Technical Profile

Joel Johnston

AI Systems Architect | Full Stack | Infrastructure

25 years building systems — from .NET beta to autonomous mesh networks

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Career Pattern

"At every job: learn it first, train the rest, or just fix it."

25+
Years professional experience
2-mode
Instant breadth or weekend turnaround
6
College-level subjects taught (WCTC 2011–2017)
Expert (9–10) Senior (7–8) Advanced (5–6) Intermediate (3–4) Beginner (1–2)

Programming Languages

C# 25 yrs
Python 10 yrs
SQL 20 yrs
Bash / Shell 22 yrs
Java 15 yrs
JavaScript 12 yrs
VB.NET 10 yrs
HTML / CSS 22 yrs
PowerShell 10 yrs
PHP 6 yrs
Go 1 yr
Rust 1 yr

Frameworks & Platforms

.NET / ASP.NET 25 yrs
Blazor Server 3 yrs
FastAPI 3 yrs
React 5 yrs
Spring Boot 5 yrs
Django 2 yrs
Odoo (v19) 1 yr

Databases

SQL Server 10 yrs
PostgreSQL 3 yrs
MongoDB 5 yrs
SQLite 3 yrs
Oracle 10 yrs

Infrastructure & DevOps

Linux 30+ yrs
Docker 5 yrs
KVM / libvirt 5 yrs
Windows Server 15 yrs
IIS 10 yrs
Kubernetes 3 yrs
Hyper-V 3 yrs
Ansible 3 yrs
Jenkins 3 yrs
Apache 3 yrs
F5 (Load Balancer) 10 yrs
Nginx 2 yrs
Terraform <1 yr

Security

Application Security 15 yrs
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) 10 yrs
SSL/TLS / Cert Management 8 yrs
Venafi 10 yrs
Hash Chain / Integrity Systems 3 yrs

AI & Machine Learning

AI Workflow Architecture 3 yrs
LLM (Large Language Model) Integration 2 yrs

Built a full ANN (Artificial Neural Network) for OCR from scratch (~2011) — forward prop, backprop, gradient descent, weight initialization. 30 years AI interest. Returned to the field via LLMs with a deterministic validation envelope.

Messaging & Integration

REST API 15 yrs
WebSocket 3 yrs
mTLS (Mutual TLS) 3 yrs
Kafka 3 yrs
TIBCO 5 yrs

Cloud & Platforms

Self-Hosted Cloud (IaaS) 5 yrs
Git 12 yrs
CI/CD Pipelines 5 yrs
Cloudflare 3 yrs

Monitoring & Observability

Grafana 2 yrs
Prometheus 2 yrs
Loki / Promtail 2 yrs

Preventive Architecture

Identifies latent failure modes in code that hasn't failed yet and closes them at the specification layer so they can't propagate across versions. Not debugging — preemptive defect-class elimination.

Specification-Driven Development 20 yrs
Root Cause Elimination 20 yrs
Design-by-Contract 15 yrs
Version Inheritance Analysis 5 yrs
Shift-Left Engineering 15 yrs

First Principles

Every tool implements a principle. These are the patterns underneath the tooling.

Pub/Sub Decouple producers from consumers via named channels
Kafka TIBCO Redis roboNet channels SignalR
Event-Driven Architecture React to events, not polling
roboNet EventEmitter Kafka webhooks SignalR MCP
State Machine Finite states with defined transitions
K8s controllers roboNet drone lifecycle CI/CD pipelines
Leader Election Distributed agreement without central authority
roboNet election Raft K8s leader election
Wire Protocol Structured message boundaries over byte streams
roboNet CLI protocol TCP HTTP/2 WebSocket
Hash Chain Append-only cryptographic verification
roboNet HCTH Git blockchain
Progressive Trust Trust earned over time, not granted at handshake
roboNet HCTH OAuth refresh cert rotation
Self-Healing Systems detect and recover from failures autonomously
K8s probes roboNet Appleseed Rule blue/green deploys
Actor Model Independent agents with message-passing, no shared state
roboNet drones microservices Erlang/OTP
Idempotency Same operation applied multiple times yields same result
REST PUT K8s reconciliation roboNet subscribers
Layered Decomposition Separate concerns into ordered dependency tiers
roboNet 9-tier UC system OSI model clean architecture
Contract-First Design Define the interface before the implementation
roboNet UCs (136) REST API specs Design-by-Contract
Separation of Concerns Each module owns exactly one responsibility
MVC roboNet packages microservices
Zero Trust Verify every request, assume breach
mTLS RBAC roboNet HCTH connection auth

Teaching

WCTC (Waukesha County Technical College)
Adjunct Instructor, 2011–2017
Subject Role
C# Web Applications Full class instructor
VB.NET Web Applications Full class instructor
MS SQL Server Database Full class instructor
Java Fill-in instructor
Linux STEM fill-in instructor
PHP STEM cross-department
Industry Capstones Student resource — direction and guidance, not implementation
"There are no wrong answers, only inefficient ones."
Consulting Founder Bio GitHub