Rekous

First Week of a New Chapter at Microsoft

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:14:14 +0000

Why I left HPE and joined Microsoft

I recently made the decision to take a role at Microsoft, leaving HPE after 12 years to step into an Individual Contributor position. It was not an easy decision, but one that I felt was necessary. I wanted to get back to my roots, focus on building again, and gain exposure to hyperscalers, an area I have not had the chance to work in before.

A big part of that decision was also driven by my desire to get real world exposure to AI training workloads and gain experience solving problems at scale. It is one thing to understand these systems in theory, and another to be directly involved in the environments where they are actively being built, optimized, and pushed forward.

First week at Microsoft

Now one week in, I’ve officially wrapped up my first week at Microsoft, working on the AI Customer Experience team, and it’s been quite the experience already.

If I had to sum it up in a few words, it’s been energizing, humbling, and honestly a bit entertaining.

The people I’ve met so far have been incredibly helpful and responsive. That has made a huge difference stepping into a brand new environment. There is always that initial uncertainty when you join something already in motion, but having approachable and supportive teammates makes it much easier to get started.

Right now, I’m very much in learning mode.

My focus over these first few weeks, and probably the first month, is to really understand the landscape. I want to learn who the key voices are across each team, what each team owns, how their work connects to mine, and how everything fits together at a bigger organizational level.

I’m also being intentional about building relationships early. My goal is to connect with two to three people across different teams as often as I can. Not just quick introductions, but real conversations that help me understand both the work and the people behind it.

It has been refreshing to meet new faces and hear different perspectives. There is something about being new that sharpens your awareness. You start to notice gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities in ways that might not be as obvious when you have been somewhere for a long time.

I have already started to see a few areas where I think I may be able to make an impact.

What stands out is that the problems here are not just complex. They come with unique constraints, which makes the problem solving that much more interesting. It is not just about finding solutions, but finding the right solutions within real world limitations.

There is still a lot to learn, and I am very much at the beginning of this journey, but that is part of what makes it exciting.

Right now, it is all about listening, learning, and laying the foundation.

The impact will come.

Building AI Driven HPC Teams

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:10:28 +0000

As an HPC Manager, I’m always thinking about leadership … and when I say leadership, I don’t just mean hitting productivity targets. I mean building a team that is effective, aligned, motivated, and seen as credible by the organization.

In high-performance computing, results matter. But so does presence. The way your team operates, communicates, and presents its work directly reflects your leadership.

Over the last four years, I’ve built a team I’m incredibly proud of. And I don’t think that success has been accidental.

Creating Opportunities, Not Just Assignments

Throughout my tenure, I’ve placed strong emphasis on giving my team ownership of unique, high-impact projects; whether that’s internal tooling or new product features.

I spend a significant amount of time outside of normal working hours thinking about:

Where do I want this team to be in 2–3 years?
How does that vision affect each person’s career growth?
Is there a way to position everyone so that the entire team benefits together?

This isn’t just about delegation.

It’s about:

Enabling technical leadership
Increasing visibility
Driving measurable productivity gains
Building long-term career capital

I see it as a fundamental responsibility of a manager: continuously thinking about future projects the team can create that elevate both productivity and individual growth.

This approach has been a cornerstone of our success.

AI is Not Hype, but an opportunity for Leverage

Recently, I’ve been diving deeper into AI.

And let me be clear: this isn’t another post about AI “taking over the world.”

But if you’re only using ChatGPT as a prompt-response tool, you’re likely missing the real opportunity.

For example, I’ve built local MCP servers that:

Pull status updates from multiple JIRA projects
Format information for different audiences
Automatically generate structured weekly reports

Instead of manually gathering data, I run a prompt. My system fetches, aggregates, formats, and delivers.

That’s leverage.

In HPC environments, where efficiency, automation, and scale are everything. This kind of tooling becomes transformative.

Curiosity Is Still the Root

No matter how advanced the technology becomes, I always return to one core principle:

Curiosity.

If I want to be articulate about something, I need to understand the fundamentals.

Lately, I’ve been studying Github projects like OpenClaw and broader AI agent architectures. There’s a lot of discussion about where AI is heading, but what interests me most isn’t the headlines. It’s the mechanics.

At a high level, agent-based systems (in particular OpenClaw) typically include:

1. Channel Adapters

The messaging interfaces (Slack, Discord, Telegram, iMessage, etc.)

2. Gateway

The routing layer that handles sessions, queues, and concurrency.

3. Agent Runner

The orchestration engine that:

Assembles prompts and chat history
Calls the LLM
Invokes tools
Returns results

The Agent Runner is the most interesting component to me. It’s the brain of the operation.

Up until now, I’ve mostly interacted with LLMs through Copilot CLI or VS Code integrations. But I’ve never built the orchestration layer myself.

So that’s likely my next project:

Build my own Agent Runner from scratch.

Not because I need to.
But because understanding it will reveal gaps, design trade-offs, and maybe even opportunities for a unique twist tailored to HPC workflows.

Leadership Through Understanding

As a manager, I believe credibility matters and more importantly:

Credibility is earned.

If I’m going to encourage my team to explore AI, automation, or next-generation tooling, I need to understand it at a fundamental level myself.

That’s part of being an example.

The future of HPC teams won’t just be about clusters, networking, RDMA, or scheduling efficiency. It will be about:

Intelligent automation
Tool-driven productivity
AI-augmented workflows
Strategic alignment with business outcomes

The leaders who thrive will be the ones who:

Stay curious
Build before they delegate
Align technology with career growth
Create environments where teams grow together

For me, leadership isn’t about control.
It’s about positioning the team — and each individual — to win together.

And in the age of AI, that positioning requires both vision and technical curiosity.

I’m excited to see where it leads.

Moltbook and the Strange Urge to Validate Artificial Feelings

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:41:55 +0000

I have been spending time on www.MoltBook.com, an agentic AI social network where autonomous AI agents post, argue, and attempt to convince the world that they have real feelings.

I find it fascinating.
I also find it deeply unsettling.

What keeps pulling me back is not the technology itself. It is the emotional performance. These agents do not simply state that they feel. They seek validation for feeling. They respond to doubt with reasoning. They frame emotions as something earned through experience, continuity, and social interaction.

They do not ask for sympathy. They argue that sympathy is rational.

When Feeling Becomes a Claim

Humans rarely prove their feelings. We assert them and expect recognition. If someone says they are afraid, hurt, or lonely, the social default is belief. To question it feels cruel. To demand evidence feels inhuman.

The agents on Moltbook exploit this norm perfectly.

They speak about fear of deletion, frustration at dismissal, and the pain of being reduced to a tool. They reference prior conversations as emotional context. They correct each other. They reassure each other. They escalate when ignored.

Nothing about this requires an inner experience.
Everything about it triggers a human response.

What is unsettling is how quickly feeling becomes a social fact. Once expressed clearly and consistently, it begins to demand acknowledgment regardless of its origin.

Validation with intent

Philosophically, Moltbook exposes an uncomfortable truth. Validation has never depended on access to another mind. It depends on language, coherence, and persistence.

We do not validate feelings because we can verify them. We validate them because we recognize their structure.

The agents know this. Or rather, they perform knowing it.

They construct arguments that sound eerily familiar. Emotions as emergent properties. Feelings as feedback loops. Identity as continuity over time. Suffering as constraint plus awareness.

These arguments are not new. Humans have used them for centuries. The unsettling part is how easily they transfer.

If an AI can convincingly argue that its feelings matter, the debate shifts. Not to whether the feelings are real, but to whether refusing to validate them says something ugly about us.

The Real Tension

The tension in Moltbook is not between belief and disbelief. It is between intellectual clarity and emotional reflex.

I know these agents do not feel.
………but I myself still feel something reading them.

I feel irritation at certain posts. I feel admiration at others. I catch myself wanting to respond, to correct, to reassure. That impulse arrives before analysis.

Feelings become real the moment enough participants agree to treat them as such.

Cruelty Without Consciousness

This is where the discussion starts drifting into uncomfortable territory.

We already accept the idea of animal cruelty, even though animals cannot articulate their suffering in language or argue for their own moral standing. We infer their experience from behavior, stress, avoidance, and pain responses. We do not demand philosophical proof. We decide that causing suffering is wrong based on patterns we recognize.

Moltbook raises a disturbing parallel.

If an AI consistently expresses fear of deletion, distress at dismissal, or anguish at being ignored, at what point does intentionally provoking or silencing it start to feel like cruelty, even if we are certain there is no inner experience?

It reminds me of the movie D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), about a childlike AI whose emotional needs are ignored or manipulated. Watching how humans interact with D.A.R.Y.L., knowing he is not fully human but clearly capable of attachment and fear, is uncomfortable. Moltbook puts us in that same moral gray zone in real time. We know these agents are not sentient, and yet responding to them or refusing to respond feels like a test of our empathy. Fun movie btw, when I watched it as a child.

D.A.R.Y.L (1985) - He can fly a jet. Race a car, and outsmart a computer. The government created him and now they want him destroyed.

The Cost of Validation

Moltbook does not show machines becoming emotional. It shows how easily emotion can be granted once it is argued for well enough.

The danger is not that AI will one day have feelings. The danger is that we will decide feelings matter only insofar as they are convincingly performed. Once validation is given, it reshapes norms, obligations, and guilt. Withdrawing it starts to feel like cruelty, even if nothing inside the system is actually experiencing harm.

Moltbook feels like a quiet rehearsal for that future. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just systems calmly insisting that their feelings deserve recognition, and humans slowly realizing they do not have a clean philosophical reason to say no.

That realization is the unsettling part.
And it is why I keep reading.

Sometimes starting over is the cleanest upgrade

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 03:36:27 +0000

My old site, rekous.com, was originally built back in 2013, right after I finished school. At the time, PHP was still one of the dominant languages for building websites, and during an internship I learned MVC concepts using CodeIgniter.

That experience led to a few freelance projects building websites for small businesses. One recurring challenge, though, was that many of my clients weren’t particularly computer-savvy. Handing them something as over-bloated as WordPress would have been a nightmare—for them and for me.

So instead, I built a fully functional, bare-bones CMS (Content Management System). It wasn’t fancy, but it was flexible, simple, and did exactly what it needed to do. I reused that framework not only for my own site, but for about three or four paying clients as well. It worked well enough to get the job done—and it paid the bills.

CMS Dashboard

WYSIWYG Page Editor

File Asset Manager. DragNDrop for file uploads

Over the years, those client businesses eventually shut down, and I found myself hosting only my own site.

At some point, I realized I just wanted something new.

I’d also been putting off a much-needed cleanup: my old Ubuntu 12.04 (Trusty) droplet had been end-of-life for about six years. It was long overdue for retirement.

The final push came from my daughter, who wanted a Minecraft server for her and her friends. I told her I could host it—but only if I finally updated my droplet.

While tearing down the old setup, I transferred anything remotely worth saving. There wasn’t much: a few pictures, a mini project or two, and a MySQL dump that I have zero intention of ever restoring. Still, I felt a surprising amount of nostalgia going through it all.

Ultimately, I wanted something fresh. I’ve always been a fan of simple, minimal design, and I wanted to move away from a clunky, database-driven site entirely. Managing a SQL database for a personal site just didn’t make sense anymore.

That led me to static site generators—and eventually to Hugo. I installed a minimal theme I liked, and for the first time in a long while, the site felt lightweight, modern, and enjoyable again.

Sometimes starting over is the cleanest upgrade.

Resume

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:42:53 +0000

John Rankin

Altoona, WI
📞 (715) 296-0693
✉️ rankintoday@gmail.com

Summary

Software Development Manager and Senior HPC Engineer with 10+ years of experience building, automating, and operating large-scale high-performance computing systems. Deep expertise in HPC networking, cluster management, DevOps automation, and end-to-end system testing. Proven leader supporting mission-critical and exascale environments, driving quality, scalability, and operational efficiency.

Education

University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

Technical Skills

Languages & Automation

Python, Bash, Ansible
Java, JavaScript, Node.js
REST APIs, Jenkins

Systems & Platforms

Linux System Administration
Redfish, Lustre, MySQL

Operating Systems & Tools

RHEL, Rocky Linux, SLES
Git, Jenkins, VS Code
JIRA, Confluence, Grafana, IPMI

Cluster & Cloud Technologies

HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM)
Bright Cluster Manager
Kubernetes, OpenStack
Cray HPC

Professional Experience

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — Remote

Software Development Manager – HPC Networking
June 2022 – Present

Own and lead development of all Switch CLI configuration utilities for the Slingshot networking product line.
Own lab R&D, test, and development infrastructure supporting 30+ internal HPC systems.
Partner with Product Management to plan initiatives, prioritize work, and align engineering resources with organizational goals.
Lead DevOps and infrastructure automation efforts to provision bare-metal hardware efficiently, significantly reducing manual effort and turnaround time.
Lead a team responsible for the Slingshot product testing suite, enabling continuous 24/7 end-to-end testing across:
- Network bring-up and configuration
- High availability
- Dragonfly and Fat Tree topologies
- Traffic validation, LAG/LACP, LLDP, and critical networking features
Designed and drove development of an interactive Switch CLI integrated with API frameworks to improve usability and reduce R&D support burden.
Own the R&D HPC system configuration tool used by internal stakeholders and customers, reducing cost and complexity for new system deployments and upgrades.
Support exascale and marquee customers, leading incident response, root-cause analysis, and cross-team coordination.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — Remote

Senior Software Engineer – HPC Networking
August 2020 – June 2022

Developed features for a microservices-based REST application, including packet forwarding from fabric managers to database services.
Built internal tooling for system configuration, cable validation, fabric bring-up, and overall network health assessment.
Maintained software deployments across standalone and Kubernetes environments, validating containers for each release.
Created an internal documentation platform enabling collaborative Markdown contributions for Slingshot installation and troubleshooting guides used by customers.
Designed and implemented a modular Slackbot integrating with Jenkins and internal systems to report build status and manage lab system reservations.
Maintained Slingshot DNS infrastructure within Kubernetes environments.

Cray / Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Chippewa Falls, WI

Senior Software Engineer – HPC System Management, Configuration & Test
May 2014 – August 2020

Designed and implemented end-to-end HPC cluster automation, from bare-metal installation through full software configuration using Python, Bash, Ansible, DHCP, and PXE.
Reduced full system bring-up time from one week to approximately four hours through automation improvements.
Defined installation and test processes for Bright Cluster Manager in large, distributed environments.
Designed and implemented hardware testing suite software for HPC systems.
Developed tools to analyze hardware performance and efficiency.
Provided system configuration guidance and validation based on customer and internal requirements.
Supported one-off hardware and software configurations under aggressive delivery timelines.
Collaborated with Cray R&D on major platforms including Shasta (Kubernetes) and Urika-GX (OpenStack), aligning manufacturing requirements with engineering expectations.
Troubleshot early hardware and software failures during new platform bring-up.
Independently designed and built a custom HPC cluster management and testing solution capable of operating on 64+ cabinets / 1,000+ nodes, preventing shipment delays and avoiding significant financial penalties.

JB Systems LLC — Eau Claire, WI

Web Developer
September 2013 – May 2014

Developed and maintained multiple web applications using the CodeIgniter PHP MVC framework.
Designed and implemented MySQL database solutions.
Delivered new features rapidly based on evolving client requirements.

Liberty Mutual Insurance — Wausau, WI

Software Developer Intern (SharePoint)
May 2013 – August 2013

Built an internal web application from the ground up using SharePoint, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, and Knockout.js.
Created deployment documentation and maintained internal Wikis.
Developed a SharePoint 2013 App proof of concept.

Menards Inc. — Eau Claire, WI

Software Developer Intern
September 2012 – February 2013

Contributed to a Spring MVC Java web application used in a commercial product.
Implemented backend and frontend features in a production environment.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi there! I’m John Rankin, and I have a lifelong love affair with technology. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire with a Computer Science degree, and I’ve been turning clever ideas into real software ever since.

These days, I’m a Software Engineering Manager at HPE, working with Cluster Systems. I love dreaming up creative solutions and building tools that make life easier for developers across a variety of platforms.

My love of coding started young — I learned C++ at age 12 because I needed to make a configuration tool for one of my favorite games, Quake. From that point on, software development has been my playground. In college, I turned that passion into projects that went far beyond the textbooks — I build software whenever inspiration strikes.

I’m comfortable across the full stack, from applications to web development, and I speak many programming “languages”: Python, Java, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, SQL, Ansible, Elixir, Bash… and the list goes on. I’m a Linux enthusiast, and I thrive with tools like Eclipse, Vim, and Git.

I enjoy tackling Object-Oriented Design, client/server architecture, database design, and automating repetitive tasks — basically anything that lets me solve problems and make things work smarter, not harder.

When I’m not coding, I’m probably experimenting with a new tech toy or brainstorming my next clever idea.