Principal engineer, author, and startup co-founder — with a long habit of building tools that help other people build things.
I'm John Ewart. I created Konstruct because I wanted an AI assistant that actually understands a codebase — not just the files you paste into a chat window, but the structure, symbols, and intent behind a real project. After years of shipping developer platforms and infrastructure tooling, that felt like the obvious next thing to build.
Things you may have used
Over the years I've helped build or improve software that millions of people touch — sometimes without knowing my name was on the commit log:
- Alexa and Goodreads at Amazon
- CodeDeploy and large-scale deployment systems at AWS — software that ships to hundreds of thousands of hosts, millions of times per week
- Chef and Terraform in the broader infrastructure ecosystem
- Travel and commerce platforms at Expedia
- Recent work as a Principal Engineer at Microsoft
I've also spent a lot of time on the less glamorous (but deeply satisfying) side of the job: continuous delivery pipelines, cloud migrations, containerization, and helping teams move faster without breaking everything at once.
Helping teams do hard things
At AWS I worked with research hospitals, cancer centers, and institutes like the Allen Institute for AI — organizations using cloud technology to improve real-world outcomes, not just slide decks. I've been a consultant, a lecturer, and the kind of engineer who shows up when the deployment graph looks like modern art and someone needs it to look like a highway again.
I'm the author of technical books including work on Chef infrastructure automation, and I've taught at universities and community colleges. Teaching keeps you honest: if you can't explain it clearly, you probably don't understand it well enough yet.
How I got here
Computers showed up early — my dad brought home our first PC the day I was born, which I choose to interpret as excellent birthday planning. I fell in love with programming around first grade, courtesy of a Logo turtle that obeyed my commands far more reliably than I could ever get my dog to.
In the sixth grade I got excited about this thing called Linux — which at the time meant having my mom drive me to the local community college so I could pull Slackware down over their T1 onto a stack of floppies, then pray that none of them had a bad sector I wouldn’t notice until I was halfway through installing it. Experiments with FreeBSD followed, along with late-night sessions configuring X11 and trying to get pppd to work over my dial-up connection.
A CS degree and time as a Ph.D. candidate in environmental systems at UC Merced came next — along with detours through geospatial programming, embedded systems, data visualization, and rebuilding more than a few car engines. Including a 1992 Corrado VR6, a car that exists because someone at VW looked at the six-cylinder in the Passat and wondered what would happen if they stuffed it into something much smaller. Amazing car. Complete nightmare.
These days I'm still the person who takes things apart to see how they work. Konstruct is what happens when that curiosity meets twenty-plus years of building software for other builders.
Off the clock
When I'm not writing code or books, I'm usually learning something new or fixing something mechanical. Whatever that curiosity is, it appears to be hereditary. As children, my daughter was a voracious reader and my son built robots and spacecraft out of Lego with alarming confidence. These days she's an occupational therapist who loves helping people improve their lives, and he's rebuilding a V8 to drop into his V6 Mustang — which, after the Corrado, I have no standing whatsoever to discourage.