About¶
Customer sidekick. Open source developer. Songwriter wannabe.
This is 1030am, my collection of hypertext dispatches on technology, personal interests, and the occasional side quest. I'm Ryan Johnson—a husband, father, technologist, and aspiring songwriter based in Tallahassee, Florida. When I'm not building or writing, you can usually find me running the nearby Red Hills trails, with a little snark in reserve.
Professional Focus¶
I work at the intersection of customer success, product engineering, and open source, helping organizations adopt cloud platforms with confidence. My career has moved between hands-on engineering leadership and direct customer engagement, but the through-line has always been the same: turning complex problems into practical, scalable systems that real teams can actually use.
Open Source & Contributions¶
I maintain and contribute to open and inner source projects across the Terraform, Packer, Ansible, Python, Go, and PowerShell ecosystems. Along the way, I've earned certifications spanning GitHub, GitLab, and core infrastructure and cloud platforms, been recognized as a two-time HashiCorp Core Contributor (2022, 2025), and held a long-standing tenure as a VMware vExpert (2013–2026). I also co-authored Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7 (Sybex) alongside fellow architects from the VMware Validated Designs team.
Writing & Interests¶
The writing here tends to follow the work itself: automation, open-source craftsmanship, and the small decisions that shape how developers actually get things done. I write to clarify my own thinking, and I publish in the hope that someone else is wrestling with the same problem.
Occasionally, something more personal finds its way in as well. A story, a reflection, or a song from my songwriting project, 39 North, that explores the tangled roots of my Southern experience, where affection and hardship, loss and belonging, grief and gratitude are often impossible to separate.
The writing here tends to follow the work itself: automation, open-source craftsmanship, and the small decisions that shape how developers actually get things done. I write to clarify my own thinking, and I publish in the hope that someone else is wrestling with the same problem.
Occasionally, something more personal finds its way in as well: a story, a reflection, or a song from my songwriting project, 39 North. That work reaches back toward Southwest Georgia, the place that raised me, where family, faith, memory, and hard labor were tilled into the red dirt, peanut rows, pine shadows, and backroads that shaped my life.
Though I no longer wake beneath those pines, that country still marks the way I write. 39 North gives voice to the those roots, where affection and hardship, loss and belonging, grief and gratitude are often impossible to separate. It returns to the people who anchored my life, the stories that refused to stay buried, and the hush of a land that follows the soul no matter how far from home it goes.