Hi, I'm Johnny.

Software Engineer • Community Organizer • Speaker • Trainer

about image

A little about me

I’m a multi-disciplined Software, Reliability, and Cloud Systems Engineer with over two decades of experience spanning various client, server and cloud infrastructure technologies. I've worked with and been a part of multiple startup founding teams and have worked at large market-leading Fortune 500 technology companies.

I've authored technology courses, collaborated on books (co-author, technical reviewer, etc), and provided corporate trainings to large technology companies. These days I work extensively with Go (golang), AWS (ECS, Fargate, Lambda, CloudFormation, etc), Microservice Architectures, and Serverless Architectures. I professionally teach the technologies I use on platforms like LinkedIn Learning, O'Reilly, Packt, and others. Whenever possible, I also teach programming workshops at no cost to learners in my local community.

Some of the highlights of my professional career so far include:

  • Architecting a cloud platform for skill inventory, skill gap analysis, and professional development for Information Professionals and Libraries with Skilltype
  • Establishing Site Reliability Engineering practices and tooling at Salesforce's Heroku
  • Building microservice and serverless applications and tools that leverage the AWS cloud to further the mission of The Achievement Network
  • Bringing Enterprise-grade time series database and cluster management solutions to market at InfluxData
  • Leading the development of the backend infrastructure for the popular consumer IoT device, Pavlok, complete with integration of services like IFTTT
  • Architecting visual merchandising technology at One Door
  • Educating the next generation of software developers at Launch Academy
  • Building the Boston-based digital agency, MAARK

My love for technology is matched only by my passion for community service:

Education & Certifications include:

  • Master of Science in Cloud Computing Architecture
  • Bachelor of Science in Computer & Information Science
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect
  • AWS Certified Developer
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

What I've been up to lately

Projects, teaching, and speaking.

Hands-On Go

Course available now at LinkedIn Learning

97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Contributing author to 97 Things Every SRE Should Know available now at Amazon

Go Time

Regular panelist on the Go Time podcast.

Go Standard Library Solutions

Course available now at Packt.

SRE as a Diplomat on InfoQ

Presentation and transcript of QCon Keynote

Go & Serverless @ O'Reilly

Multiple Go and serverless orchestration trainings on O'Reilly's learning platform

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Archive of talks, trainings, and other engagements

  1. January 2023 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go Generics in 2 Hours.
  2. November 2022 - Created and released "Hands-On Go" course at LinkedIn Learning
  3. October 2022 - Trained 25-student cohort in Go backend development for 7 weeks at Pivot Technology School
  4. September 2022 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go Generics in 2 Hours.
  5. August 2022 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go in 3 Weeks @ O'Reilly Media.
  6. July 2022 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go Generics in 2 Hours.
  7. April 2022 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go in 3 Weeks @ O'Reilly Media.
  8. January 2022 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go in 3 Weeks @ O'Reilly Media.
  9. January 2022 - Guest speaker, Association for Computing Machinery. The Art of Concurrency in Go.
  10. January 2022 - Guest on PodRocket. Getting Started with Golang.
  11. December 2021 - Closing Keynote Speaker @ GopherCon 2021.Unbounded Concurrency in Go (live with Aaron Schlesinger)
  12. June 2021 - Speaker at Craft Conference. Extended version of "Unbounded Concurrency" talk.
  13. May 2021 - Trainer at GopherCon EU. Practical Go Workshop.
  14. April 2021 - Speaker at Open Source Software Superstream Series: Go—Generics, Extensibility, and the Future of Go in Open Source Programming
  15. March 2021 - Speaker at Golang NYC. Delivered "Unbounded Concurrency"
  16. January 2021 - Speaker at Lagos Gophers. Delivered "Let's build a port scanner with Go."
  17. November 2020 - Keynote Speaker @ QCon. The SRE as a Diplomat
  18. September 2020 - Speaker at National Information Standards Organization (NISO) event where I delivered a talk on privacy and search technology.
  19. June 2020 - InfoQ Podcast Guest - Serverless Go and Site Reliability Engineering at Heroku
  20. May 2020 - Speaker @ GoGetCommunity 2020. Closing keynote at Go Get Community.
  21. May 2020 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Go Next Steps @ O'Reilly Media. .
  22. May 2020 - Live Training @ O'Reilly. Serverless Go @ O'Reilly Media.
  23. 2020 - GopherCon 2020 Program Committe
  24. July 2019 - Speaker @ GopherCon 2019. Closing Keynote.
  25. July 2019 - Trainer @ GopherCon 2019
  26. 2019 - GopherCon 2019 Program Committe
  27. January 2019 - Speaker @ Columbia AWS. Serverless Lens on AWS Well Architected Framework.
  28. October 2018 - Speaker @ Columbia AWS. Serverless Orchestration on AWS.
  29. October 2018 - Speaker @ Baltimore Innovaton Week's Developer Conference. Delivered a talk on Go, FaaS/Serverless Orchestration.
  30. August 2018 - Speaker @ GopherCon 2018 (Lightning Talks). Delivered a lightning talk on Go, FaaS/Serverless on AWS
  31. August 2018 - Go Workshop Trainer @ GopherCon 2018. Full day Go training at GopherCon 2018
  32. October 2017 - Speaker @ DevFest MD 2017 Conference. Delivered a workshop on getting started with the Go programming language.
  33. September 2017 - Speaker @ Code(Her) Conference 2017. Delivered a 2-hour workshop on building Serverless Slack Bots with AWS Lambda at Coder(Her) Conference
  34. June 2017 - Co-host of Go Time 49: Adventures in VS Code.
  35. May 2017 - Speaker @ Baltimore Go User Group. Delivered "Popular Go Libraries" talk at the Baltimore Go User Group.
  36. April 2017 - Speaker @ Capitol Go Language Conference 2017. Delivered "Mine the Debt" at the inaugural Capital Go Language Conference.
  37. March 2017 - Guest on the Hacker Practice Podcast
  38. March 2017 - Co-host of Go Time 38: Go Developer Survey with Steve Francia.
  39. February 2017 - Featured as a Go Expert to Follow on New Relic blog.
  40. February 2017 - Speaker @ Google Developer Group Baltimore. Delivered "Go, Quickly", a talk on how to get started programming in Go.
  41. February 2017 - Speaker @ Baltimore Go User Group. Delivered "Interacting with Databases" workshop at the Baltimore Go User Group.
  42. January 2017 - Guest on the Go Time 30: Discussing Imposter Syndrome along with William Kennedy.
  43. January 2017 - Speaker @ Baltimore Go User Group. Delivered "Building Web Applications in Go" workshop at the Baltimore Go User Group.
  44. December 2016 - Speaker @ Baltimore Go User Group. Delivered "Building Chat Bots in Golang" workshop at the Baltimore Go User Group.
  45. November 2016 - Speaker @ Baltimore Go User Group. Delivered "Building Command Line Applications with Go" workshop at the Baltimore Go User Group.
  46. May 2016 - Organizer/Teacher @ GoBridge Boston Workshop. Organized and taught the first GoBridge Boston workshop thanks in large part to the awesome gophers in the Boston area and the support of Pivotal Labs.
  47. September 2015 - Featured on "An Inside Look with Codeship", a regular series providing an insider’s perspective on founding and building a tech company. Available on YouTube as well.
  48. September 2015 - Speaker @ Code(Her) Conference 2015. Delivered two workshops: "Programming Fundamentals" and "Building APIs for Web and Mobile Apps"
  49. January 2015 - Intro to Ruby for the Non Programmer talk given at the RailsBridge Workshop in Boston, MA . RailsBridge is an organization that aims to bring diversity into the tech community by empowering women from various backgrounds with skills in Ruby and Rails development. Check out their trailer on Vimeo.
  50. September 2014 - Building APIs for Web and Mobile Apps at Code(Her)Conference, a 2+ hour-long workshop to conference attendees on how to build REST APIs. It was well received and I was invited back as a speaker the following year.
  51. August 2014 - Panel Guest on The Future of Ruby at the Burlington Ruby Conference where I, along with Sandi Metz and Ernie Miller, discussed the future of the Ruby programming language and its community.
  52. February 2014 - Object Oriented Programming in Golang talk given at BostonGolang (bostongolang.org) to an audience of programmers looking to transition to Go from other OO languages.
  53. June 2013 - Building Command Line Tools talk given to the first cohort of Launch Academy in Boston, MA, who at that time had gone through several weeks of training and hands-on experience with web application development since my last visit. This talk was meant to present an alternative approach to tackling problems that do not necessarily need to be solved using the traditional web stack.
  54. May 2013 - The New Engineer's Survival Guide to the first cohort of Launch Academy in Boston, MA. It was meant to serve as a precursor of things to come in your engineering career and be encouraging as well.
  55. May 2013 - Getting Closure: Ruby Blocks, Procs and Lambdas talk given at BostonRB. An introduction to an aspect of Ruby that is not talked about very often but that represents one of the distinctive features of the language.
  56. January 2013 - Defensive Programming in Ruby: Given as a workshop at BostonRB's Project Night. Introduced new Rubyists to concepts surrounding writing fault-tolerant Ruby.