About

I’m John G. Norman. I'm the VP of Security and Compliance at Healthie. Formerly I was the Senior Director of Information Security at One Medical (acquired by Amazon), and before that I was VP of Technology at Iora Health (acquired by One Medical); I also served as Iora's HIPAA Security Officer.

People have asked me about the name of this site: 7fff is the hexadecimal representation of the largest number that can be represented in sixteen bits (signed two’s complement). You might know this value better as 32767 decimal. I had kind of a crush on 32767 when I was in high school. I like "7fff" because it's easy to type and easy to remember -- and it gets a bit of a laugh from nerds.

I was a co-founder of H3.com (2003), which was a service for rewarding (with cash) referrals for employment: For a post-mortem regarding what we were trying to do, read this recap by our then CEO, Hans Gieskes. I wrote all of the code and did the DevOps work. The codebase was in Java and exposed SOAP and REST API endpoints. There are a number of companies that are still trying to crack this nut (incentivized referrals), but it’s a hard one, and I don’t think anyone has really figured it out. Good luck!

I was also the technical founder for Roomzilla (2010), where I wrote all of the initial code in Ruby. With Roomzilla, you attach tablet computers outside of each of your conference rooms to show the reservation status; it ties into Google Calendar and Microsoft calendaring to keep everything synchronized. Roomzilla is in business today, and is a great choice for coworking centers that want to manage shared conference rooms across all of their tenants.

If you want to know more, check out my LinkedIn profile. I write quick reviews of most books I read; you can check out the reviews on Goodreads. You can reach me at john at 7fff dot com, jgn on GitHub or tuke on Twitter (That “tuke” handle is after Brian Tuke who was Henry VIII’s mailman — I spent a lot of time reading his letters when I was writing my dissertation — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Tuke).

I have no relation whatsoever to the science fiction author John Frederick Lange, Jr., who goes by the pen name John Norman. I am also not the same person as the John Norman who is the head of e-learning at Cambridge in the UK. Yet I am (still) that same John Norman who studied English Literature at Harvard and later taught at Ohio State, where I was, towards the end, Director of the Computers in Composition and Literature program. More recently I’ve taught media studies at the New School in New York City, and engineering at Harvard Extension and at the University of Minnesota.

I am not currently seeking employment or consulting, but I love to hear people talk about their awesome technology, so seek me out if you’re doing anything mind-blowing. I do occasionally help my friends as a technical advisor to their startups.

If you need a public key . . . click.

I build this site in Ruby using the Middleman static site generator. That's why it's fast. There are some interesting hacks and extensions, such as a custom Markdown renderer. The code also leverages a custom gem to provide categories for posts (which was a feature I always liked in WordPress). If you want to see more code I've written, perhaps start with my implementation of the Hawk protocol.

Another thing I should mention is the wiki linked from the nav bar. This is implemented using Gollum which was the software that originally drove Github's wikis. I run this on a physical server. The server runs two instances of Gollum. One is my personal wiki. This instance provides read/write access to the wiki. I front this with an OAuth2 Proxy and Nginx. I can log in with my Github credentials and keep notes in the wiki. The other instance is pointed to a folder within my personal wiki, and is set up to only support HTTP GET. By this means, I keep files in one directory and share them two different ways: One with auth, the other (read-only) without auth. The whole wiki is backed up with DropBox.

Some of these credentials are out of date; check my LinkedIn profile for more of this.