The Shark Artist
John Sirmon
The Shark Artist
About
Welcome to The Shark Artist— My name is John Sirmon and I'm just a computer nerd and proud son of an Art Teacher with a lifelong love of Sharks. Obsessed since the '80s—diving with sharks, studying sharks, carving sharks, painting sharks, shark tattoos... Basically, I'm Shark Week in human form. I'm from Spartanburg, South Carolina and like my father, uncle and cousins, I graduated from The Citadel. I’m also a proud father of two amazing boys who inspire me daily.
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Art and Music
Well ...my mom was an Art teacher. I've been painting, drawing, sculpting my entire life and I have my Mom to thank. I’ve also spent over 30 years playing guitar and singing in metal and rock bands. If nothing else, it’s taught me how to drown out criticism. Art is my right-brained escape and the ultimate stress reliever from my left-brained, technical day job
Obsession with Sharks
My fascination with sharks began at the age of six, inspired by legends like Eugenie Clark, Rodney Fox, and Jacques Cousteau. I’ve devoured every book, documentary, and piece of trivia about sharks—more than any normal person should probably know. This obsession has taken me underwater, scuba diving alongside these incredible creatures, and I think I've seen every episode of Shark week since the late 80s when it began.
My mother introduced me to the works of greats like Michelangelo, da Vinci, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer. Later, I discovered Richard Ellis through one of my many shark books, sparking a lifelong pursuit of drawing, painting, and sculpting sharks in every form.
I even have nine shark tattoos serve as a constant reminder of my dedication—and my questionable decision-making skills
The technical side
By day, I’m an Embedded Escalation Engineer at Microsoft, solving complex problems. I’ve been at Microsoft for over 20 years, specializing in cloud computing, with a strong focus on Azure since its inception. I’ve authored technical books and whitepapers, spoken at numerous conferences, and have recently been focused on retrieval-augmented generation pipelines with large language models. I’m passionate about learning new things and excel at troubleshooting and fixing problems.
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In my 20 plus years in the software industry, my work has always been centered around 3 things: Customers, Data and problem solving. I've had thousands of interactions with customers and spent more time with data than any normal person should. My fascination with customers and data has given me an empirical understanding of data analysis, visualization and modeling. These first two constants in my life have led me to the third. Problem solving has taken me all over the world and allowed me to make a difference. I have found that making a difference is the single most important aspect of job satisfaction... and heck... even life satisfaction. Lastly, my secret weapon has always been understanding the data... whether it is volumes of cryptic telemetry data, an exponential trend of sales data in a meticulously maintained data warehouse or simply an error timestamp cross referenced with web logs. Data often provides the only truth that allows me to identify whatever I'm seeking.