Welcome to my Experiment Lab!

I have always been hands-on and believe strongly that the best leaders (especially in software) should be able to dive deep and understand the work that their teams are doing. This website is a way for me to share my skills, learn new things, and share my journey. Eventually, I will start to showcase some of my other talents with some Open Source code and projects, and I hope to build a collaborative space for developers. Please feel free to send me feedback, comments, or berate me for my poor web development skills! I am not much of a web developer (or designer), but I'm looking forward to learning and taking you on this journey with me.

My name is John Bernard and I am a software leader with over a decade of experience leading teams and organizations to success. My journey to get here has been a backwards one, starting out in the Army teaching Soldiers hand-to-hand combat, leading Intelligence teams, and mentoring junior Leaders. During this time, I got to work with some amazing software teams that developed our Intelligence systems and instilled a passion for Agile software development and innovation.

Upon leaving the Army, I worked in a number of industries leading teams and organizations to success, from Real Estate to Construction to building Networks for COCOMs. I often found myself leading Agile change in organizations that were typically waterfall and re-working processes to be more innovative and efficient, including in the initial bidding and contracting phases of projects. In the last five years, I have been diving fully into the software world, building full stack applications, platforms, and solutions for the DoD. It has been a huge learning curve, but I have enjoyed every minute of it. Most recently, I'm learning all about Observability, SRE, and advanced Kubernetes and Cloud solutions.