ISSUE #125CRYPTOFLEX / ENGINEERING LABMAY 30, 2026

Personal blog · Field notes

Build in public.
Break things
on purpose.

Long-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.

Read the blog →About Chris

Chris Johnson
Engineer · Builder · Researcher

§ 01 / The Blog

The Blog

From the workshop.

Notes, experiments, and postmortems. Writing is a thinking tool here, not a marketing funnel.

● Lead Story

LOG LAKE panel build, branded NotebookLM infographic. Two halves. Top half is the clean architecture (ingestion-health strip, GUI query builder, identifier-allowlist compiler, parameterized ClickHouse SQL). Bottom half is the five-bug deploy gauntlet (readonly-pool 500, poll crash loop, 20-day Pi-hole gap, stale Vector config, UDM doubled-hostname frame). Closes with the meta-lesson, one SELECT count() that revealed 100% of 159,909 rows were DNAT and vetoed a complex rewrite in favor of a four-line MV recreation.

Home LabSIEMClickHouse

Home Network Mission Control: The LOG LAKE Panel, Five Deploy Bugs, and a Vetoed Bytes-Codec Rewrite

Part 6 of the home network dashboard build. The LOG LAKE panel ships a SIEM ingestion-health strip and a GUI firewall query builder that compiles to parameterized ClickHouse under the hood. One PR, two waves, 1193 backend tests at merge. Then deploy day on the live Mac mini produced five production-only bugs in a single afternoon: a readonly-pool 500, a timezone-mixed poll crash that had been firing every five minutes for hours, a 20-day-silent Pi-hole pipeline (two layers stacked), a Vector container reading a stale bind-mounted config, and a UDM doubled-hostname frame that silently broke action derivation for 159,909 rows. The meta-lesson is that the proposed fix for the last one was an invasive Vector source rewrite that the persona team vetoed in favor of an operator toggle and a four-line MV recreation.

24 min readMay 30, 2026Read →

Home Lab

Homelab Wazuh, Part 2: The Nine-Wave Deploy and First Contact With the Live Server

22 min read · May 15, 2026

SIEM

Building a Custom SIEM, Part 1: Why and the Architecture

14 min read · May 14, 2026

All posts (75)Go to the full archive →

§ 02 / About the Author

If you like engineering that's pragmatic, iterative, and a little experimental, you'll feel at home here.

Chris Johnson — Engineer & Operator

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.

§ 03 / Selected Work

Portfolio

Things I've shipped.

Six representative builds — memory architecture, MCP servers, retro game rebuilds, and agent systems. More on the portfolio page.

01 / 06

Persistent Memory for Claude Code

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.

Two-tier persistent memory architecture for Claude Code

Claude CodeMCPVector DB

02 / 06

Third Conflict

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.

TypeScriptReactGame AI

03 / 06

Custom UniFi MCP

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.

UniFi MCP infographic — 103 tools, 208 tests, three days

PythonFastMCPUniFi

04 / 06

Claude Code Config

Open-source automation system: persistent vector memory, knowledge graph, 30+ custom skills, multi-repo orchestration, continuous learning loop.

TypeScriptMCPSQLite

05 / 06

OpenClaw

Seven-agent orchestration system on a headless Mac Mini. Telegram bots per agent, pixel-art Mission Control dashboard, Ollama embeddings, watchdogs.

OpenClawOllamaTelegram

06 / 06

5-Layer Memory System vs. The World

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.

5-layer memory architecture vs. community approaches — comparison infographic

Deep ResearchMCPMemory

§ 04 / Consulting

Services

Selective engagements.

I take on a small number of projects through CryptoFlex LLC each year. Cybersecurity, infrastructure, strategy, web.

Security Consulting

Security assessments, vulnerability analysis, and architecture review. Practical risk posture work without the vendor push.

Posture assessments
Vulnerability analysis
Architecture review
IR planning

IT Infrastructure

Network design, server infrastructure, and cloud architecture for small office to hybrid environments.

Network design
Server infrastructure
Cloud migration
Performance tuning

IT Strategy

Technology strategy for small businesses. Make smart decisions without vendor sales pressure.

Roadmapping
Vendor-neutral advice
Budget planning
Project management

Web Development

Modern, fast, secure websites for businesses. Build, host, maintain — one operator, no agency overhead.

Custom design & build
Hosting & maintenance
Performance & SEO
Ongoing updates

§ 05 / Career Log

CV / Timeline

A working history.

Unusual path into security engineering. Every stop left a fingerprint on how I build now.

Today

Cybersecurity Defense OperationsSecurity engineering & SOC — detection, response, resilience.

Florida

Mid 2020s

Security Engineer & Cloud ArchitectHardened systems, designed controls, built cloud infrastructure.

Remote

Early 2020s

IT OperationsService desk, project management, developer work across the stack.

Various

Late 2010s

Chem/Bio DefenseMission-critical operations at the Pentagon and US Capitol.

Washington, DC

Earlier

Intelligence & Combat OperationsUS military — analyst and combat veteran (Iraq, Afghanistan).

Deployed

Build in public.Break thingson purpose.