Mike Johnson, CTO in Practice

/now

Published on April 9, 2026

Now pages seem to have a bit of momentum and I guess I am feeling nostalgic for the old internet of quirky personal sites. That’s my now, like right now, motivating this addition. Also, right now wishing I was quirky.

Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.

I assume we worked together if you read this page.

Right now I’m:

  • Looking forward to Pycon in Long Beach! I mean, it’s no Montreal, but being able to drive to Pycon will be pretty great.

  • Thinking a lot about Javascript frontend frameworks and what comes after React. I saw MDN updated to use Lit components and I’m feeling validated 😂.

  • Me in a meeting: “you either believe AI will never become super-intelligent so we should tweak the code to be more easily generated, or you believe AI will become AGI and in that case it doesn’t really matter. Nothing will really matter when we’re dodging roving packs of looters. It doesn’t really make sense to even prepare for that world because none of us will still be employed, anyhow.”

  • We’ll see how that ages.

Personally

  • Wife and I have separated recently. It’s been a hard change but sometimes big life events change people. We’ve realized that we’re just not on the same trajectories anymore.

  • I’ve installed a second car charger for when my son drives the other car 😳

  • I’m back in my old office and considering how to decorate. This should be a post sometime but I’m thinking about ways to do a sailboat, teak-style thing. Not super novel perhaps but I would love it.

  • It’s proving to be a hot spring. I have two half marathons coming up and a 70 mile bike ride in Big Bear. I’m training early in the mornings (before coffee!).

Current interests

  • I’ve been really thinking about writing experiences online and how I really wish there was a good Medium-type site that wasn’t crammed full of Medium-type writing. You know, something quirky.

  • Cycling has been a fun new thing for me. Great, now I wish I had an office to commute to.

Home lab

Main: custom built AMD 9950X, 64GB Ram, Radeon 7800 XT.

  • Regularly outscores sons in Helldivers 2

  • Debian Unstable. I was using testing for a bit but kept running into package issues (due to the impending release), but being back on unstable is nice after a few years of distro-wandering.

Laptop: Tuxedo Pulse II

Homelab

  • k3s on two old System 76 laptops (Darter and Gazelle something or others)

  • Homeassistant

  • Immich

  • Vaultwarden

  • Jellyfin

  • Plex

  • Miniflux

  • Paperless

  • So far!

Tech stack:

  • Python, Go and Typescript are the mains right now.