// 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.
I know very little about game development. My retro 4X remake now has animated turn playback, a parallax starfield, a working AI planner, and 221 new passing tests anyway, thanks to one session with Claude Fable 5 and seven agents running in parallel. Also included: the difficulty system we caught making easy mode stronger than hard.
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 — memory architecture, MCP servers, retro game rebuilds, and agent systems. More on the portfolio page.
Two-tier memory architecture: a global rule file plus a vector-database MCP server with 30-day temporal decay. Context survives every session with zero manual effort.
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.
103 tools, 208 unit tests, 12 hours across three days. A lazy-loading UniFi MCP server packaged as a Claude Code plugin that installs with two slash commands.
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.
22 sources, 3 parallel research agents, 18 search queries. Benchmarked my 5-layer memory architecture against community norms and shipped three improvements the same day.
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.