// chris johnsonLong-form writing on security engineering, AI-assisted development, and the craft of shipping things that actually work. Stream-of-consciousness notes from a working lab, not a brochure.
Chris Johnson
Engineer · Builder · Researcher
Notes, experiments, and postmortems. Writing is a thinking tool here, not a marketing funnel.
Anthropic launched claude.ai/design the same week I'd been sketching a new look for this site. I did the design work in the browser, exported the handoff bundle, pointed Claude Code at it, and got a production rebuild six phases later with zero new npm dependencies.
If you like engineering that's pragmatic, iterative, and a little experimental, you'll feel at home here.
I'm an engineer who uses this blog as a playground. Ship things, learn fast, write it down. My career bounced through military intelligence, chem/bio defense at the Pentagon, IT operations, security engineering, and cloud architecture before landing in cybersecurity defense operations, where I spend most of my days now.
The work here skews toward security engineering, AI-assisted development, and the long-tail craft of making things that actually run in production. I write because the fastest way to learn is to build in public — most posts are postmortems of projects I'm actively wrestling with, not tidy retrospectives from the other side.
Six representative builds — full-stack sites, retro game rebuilds, agent systems, and infrastructure. More on the portfolio page.
Full-stack production site: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript. Custom analytics, newsletter, comments, MDX engine. Built end-to-end with Claude Code.
Browser-based 4X space strategy game rebuilt from a 1991 DOS classic. Tech trees, admiral system, four AI strategies, and 5,250+ lines of pure-function architecture.
Recreation of a 1990 Windows 3.1 artillery game. Three-layer engine/store/render architecture with procedural terrain, physics AI, four biomes.
Open-source automation system: persistent vector memory, knowledge graph, 30+ custom skills, multi-repo orchestration, continuous learning loop.
Seven-agent orchestration system on a headless Mac Mini. Telegram bots per agent, pixel-art Mission Control dashboard, Ollama embeddings, watchdogs.
Multi-GPU mining operation built from scratch. Hardware selection, thermal management, power distribution, Linux sysadmin deep-dive.
I take on a small number of projects through CryptoFlex LLC each year. Cybersecurity, infrastructure, strategy, web.
Security assessments, vulnerability analysis, and architecture review. Practical risk posture work without the vendor push.
Network design, server infrastructure, and cloud architecture for small office to hybrid environments.
Technology strategy for small businesses. Make smart decisions without vendor sales pressure.
Modern, fast, secure websites for businesses. Build, host, maintain — one operator, no agency overhead.
Unusual path into security engineering. Every stop left a fingerprint on how I build now.
One email a week with postmortems, short essays, and anything I found worth linking. No tracker pixels, no growth hacks — just what I'm actually reading and building.