About Me

Hi, I'm Brian. Welcome to my home on the web. 👋

Brian Johnson

Enterprise Solutions Architect

Booz | Allen | Hamilton

I’m a technology professional in Tampa, Florida where I live with my beautiful wife and two children. Tampa has been good to us, and we all really enjoy it here. The city provides us with plenty of opportunities for both work and fun, and the weather is generally great, too!

The family and I love spending time on the weekends at Busch Gardens or Adventure Island and, every now and then, we make it out to the Straz Center to see a show. Though the family isn’t interested in tagging along, I make a point to attend tech meetups on a (somewhat) regular basis, as well. At home, you’ll usually find me with my nose in a book or out working in the garden. I grew up in a rural farming community, so agriculture and gardening are near and dear to my heart.

I’ve been particularly fortunate in my professional life. I’ve been an engineering and technology enthusiast since I was very young, so I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to do what I love: working with electronics hardware and computer software systems. I spent the first decade of my career working on the hardware side of things and I’ve spent the last decade focusing more on software and cloud infrastructure. I’ve worked for large companies like Honeywell and small startups that were successfully acquired. I’ve worked all across the U.S. and spent a little time in Canada. I even worked for several years in Vienna, Austria and Zürich, Switzerland. How cool is that?

Professional Work

A bit about what I do for a living. 💼

I am currently employed as a Enterprise Solutions Architect at Booz Allen Hamilton, a top-tier technology services firm that specializes in serving federal agencies and national defense. Most of the work I do is focused on modernizing systems at the Department of Veteran Affairs and, as a veteran, I find the work very fulfilling.

In the following sections, I dive a little deeper into my core competencies and explain what I do in more detail.

Enterprise Web Apps & APIs

Web applications are ubiquitus in an modern enterprise. I spend a significant amount of time designing, building, integrating, deploying, and supporting them. These apps are typically built as reactive Single Page Applications (SPAs) to mimic the modern look and feel of mobile apps. These applications communicate with a REST API backend written in Java Spring Boot or NodeJS/TypeScript. Java is more prevalent with on-prem hosting and NodeJS/TypeScript is more common for cloud deployments.

Enterprise System Integrations

For any new application or system, I spend a significant amount of time determining how best to integrate it with the existing systems in the IT landscape. Some of these systems will be shiny and new and take advantage of modern file formats and protocols; others will be archaic mainframes that are almost as old as me—maybe older?

Some of the most common integrations are:

• Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) via OIDC or SAML
• Batch or streaming data transfers to/from other systems
• Publish and/or subscribe to events from messaging platforms
• Query data from the enterprise data lake or data warehouse

AWS & Azure Solution Architecture

By now, every enterprise is either in the cloud or in the process of migrating to it. Consequently, most of my solutions involve new cloud-native apps or migrating legacy applications to the cloud. New applications are usually architected using cloud-native or cloud-managed services such as S3, RDS/Aurora, Lambda, SNS, SQS, ECS/EKS—or the equivalent services on Azure—and data streaming platforms like Kafka.

For each product, I develop a Solution Architecture Package that includes the business architecture, application architecture, data architecture, cloud infrastructure, and the team composition required to develop, operationalize, and secure the new application/system in the target cloud environment within the expected timeframe.

DevSecOps Automation

Application development doesn't stop after the MVP released. Applications must be actively sustained while in production and require patches to fix bugs or security vulnerabilities. Additionally, critical products will receive regular rounds of funding for feature enhancements to better serve the enterprise. The key to ensuring fast, secure, repeatable, and low cost releases is to have automated DevSecOps processes in place.

When I develop a solution for a particular product, it includes an automated Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline that automates testing, scans the code and any containers for security vulnerabilities, and automates the deployment (and possible rollback) of each release.

Certifications

A list of my professional certifications. ⭐

AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate

Azure Cloud Solutions Architect Expert

JavaScript/TypeScript Developer Expert

Scaled Agile Practice Consultant

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt

Accomplishments

Some of my notable achievements. 🥳

Superguud was a startup retail brand concept created by Fan Gene Retail Services in Zürich, Switzerland. The sales were phenomenal, but they were having challenges keeping costs under control—which was preventing them from selling the brand at the price they wanted.

I built a custom enterprise application that integrated nicely with their POS and ERP systems that could track sales, costs, and employee performance. I then focused on automating as many of their time-consuming and/or costly processes as possible. Over the course of 2.5 years, I was able to help the founders achieve their objectives and the startup was successfully sold to Valora, the market leader in Europe.

cogvisAI is a healthcare AI startup based in Vienna, Austria. They manufacture AI-based IoT sensors that detect when people fall without taking any video or otherwise violating privacy. The startup was growing fast, and the management needed help in two areas:

1. Improving scalability of their IoT infrastructure.
2. Building a mobile application for their product

Based on the sales projections, the IoT infrastructure need to scale massively—we’re talking around 1000x its current capacity. I designed their target cloud architecture and, along with an AWS partner, helped to implement most of it. The solution was completely serverless and utilized services such as S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, IoT Core, IoT Device Management, ECS, SQS, SNS, and Data Lake.

The mobile application was built using a Angular and a compile-to-native approach that would work for Android or iOS. The app was used by nurses to receive fall notifications with point cloud images so nurses could respond immediately or cancel the nurse alarm if the patient was okay.

Great Sales Force (GSF) is a sales consultancy located in Vienna, Austria. They conduct market research and analysis that help companies to determine how well their sales teams compare to other companies within the industry and, even more importantly, where management should focus their efforts to improve their sales team’s performance.

GSF had a great product. So great that it was selling a little too well. Scaling operations without proportionally increasing office space and headcount was proving a challenge. Additionally, the management was concerned about keeping their IP in SaaS analytics platforms and wanted more control over their data. Over the course of a year, I built GSF a custom web application that would integrate with their existing tools and an Azure-based cloud analytics platform that would automatically calculate their proprietary benchmarks. This solution automated their process bottlenecks and secured their proprietary data in their private Azure cloud account.

Honeywell Technology Solutions provides engineering support services to the parent organization, Honeywell Aerospace. I served as a Deputy Program Manager within the Sustaining Engineering & Assurances Services (SEAS) business unit. At Honeywell, project and program managers are required to obtain a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt to maintain job qualifications. And, to obtain my green belt certification, I had to deliver on a real lean six sigma project.

Instead of choosing something simple/small to focus more on the process itself, I took a “go big or go home” approach and searched for an idea that would have big impact. Through my analysis, I discovered that different Honeywell sites were paying drastically different prices for the same vendor services and products. My lean six sigma project launched a new “consolidated vendor management program” that managed vendor costs across all sites. The initiative led to a cost savings of over $500k/year, year over year, for Honeywell.

Recognition

Some nice things people have said about me. 😊