In 2013 I published a paper titled Beam Viewer Controls at Jefferson Lab through the International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems (ICALEPCS), held that year in San Francisco. The paper details a complete rewrite of the control system software responsible for managing beam viewer devices on the 12 GeV CEBAF particle accelerator at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia.
You can read the paper on ResearchGate: Beam Viewer Controls at Jefferson Lab. There is something genuinely satisfying — and very cool — about searching for your own name on a research database and finding a published paper staring back at you. For an engineer who spent years in the trenches writing C++ and debugging hardware signals, seeing that work preserved and indexed alongside physics research from around the world is a quiet kind of thrill.
Hey there, and welcome to my corner of the internet!
I’m Mike Johnson, and I’ve decided to start this blog as a kind of public diary for my tech explorations. If you’ve stumbled across this site, you’re probably here because we’ve crossed paths somewhere in the software world, followed my link from LinkedIn, or maybe you’re just curious about what a lifelong technologist gets up to when curiosity strikes.
I tend to post most often about programming languages and code—it’s where I live and breathe professionally—but my interests wander into interesting territories like quantum computing, cryptography, and computer architecture and assembly language. Think of this as my learning lab, written out loud. I’m approaching each topic with curiosity and a beginner’s mind, even after three decades in the field. Because that’s when the best learning happens.
