Josh.
I make things*
*(see also: purveyor of sawdust and snark enthusiast)
Hi, my name is
Mission Statement
Who am I? What’s my deal? Why should you care? Whoa there, buddy. Pump the brakes. What’s with the interrogation? Alright, then. Let’s break down my mission statement then. Strike that. Mission statement sounds too stuffed up, official and professional. We’ll be having none of that here. I am not a corporate brand. I guess I’m just, like, this guy, you know?
While I grew up in the midwest U.S. being surrounded by processed foods and cheap industrial-manufactured goods, I’ve always had an interest in disassembling things, figuring out how they work, and then exploring the limits of creating from scratch. Sure, it’s not always practical, but that’s just part of the discovery process. As Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
I’m just a hobbyist maker with no formal training in anything whatsoever - largely self-taught, a “feral learner” if you will. I’ve mostly just figured out how to do things on my own through trial & error and just from watching others. I am certainly no expert, but I enjoy attempting to take my own spin at things whether that’s in the kitchen, workshop, studio, garden, or just around the house. You’ll find some of those projects documented on the pages here.
Work
While I spent the first two decades of my career in software engineering as a software developer in product and infrastructure engineering teams at web scale startups, I now focus on building and growing awesome engineering teams as an engineering leader.
I am currently an Engineering Manager at Nava PBC.
Directed SRE team responsible for managing the combined Creative Market and Dribbble infrastructures.
Planned and led strategic roadmap initiatives to continuously modernize infrastructure through IaC and containerization best practices.
Managed the DevOps and Shops engineering teams. Led the launch of a blog re-platforming project, coordinating across multiple departments and outside vendors.
Partnered with other engineering leaders and department heads to redefine engineering processes, leading to safer, more efficient workflows.
Acted as Hiring Manager for multiple hiring pipelines to scale the existing engineering and DevOps teams.
Senior Operations Engineer
Aug 2013 - Feb 2021
Led design & deployment of AWS cloud infrastructure and migration from on-premise environment. Created application CI and deployment pipelines.
Built and maintained internal go-based microservices. Developed and maintained font rendering and image manipulation services.
Built and maintained internal go-based microservices. Developed and maintained font rendering and image manipulation services.
At FirstGiving.com I worked with a team building a suite of tools used for processing donations for 501(c)(3) Non Profit Organizations.
The applications included RESTful web API’s for searching over 2 million organizations and performing donation transaction processing,
an embeddable button widget with a popup donation window, a Facebook donation application, and backend reporting and analytics tools.
My work included backend and frontend feature implementation, 3rd party partner support, documentation, and long term application maintenance.
I was also charged with all of the application deployment and server management tasks. As the primary engineer in charge of AWS-based server infrastructure,
I designed and managed the server deployments and developed the application deployment tools and procedures.
My 2+ year role as a senior engineer for minted.com began shortly prior to launch. Over the several following years, the site grew into a successful high-end online stationery business. During my time here I contributed many significant key features as well as overall site improvements. The work ranged from defining core API and site architecture components and implementing core e-commerce and social platform features, to server configuration, monitoring, deployment, and administration. Some of the feature work included:
- Promotional engine capabilities
- Cart and checkout features
- Product format & feature implementation
- Product customization abilities
- Delivery estimator tool
- 3rd party API integrations with Twitter, Facebook, Cybersource, Serena, Amazon
Designed, built, and maintained multiple web applications for transportation logistics companies. Implemented technical solutions based on non-technical business user needs. Worked with partner companies to provide connectivity between web portal and AS/400 systems via EDI and FTP transports.
Developed online intranet toolset and document imaging and archiving systems used to facilitate transportation logistics. Integrated third-party backend network tools using C and Perl with custom-built web interfaces.
Built numerous consumer-facing media websites, administrative back ends and e-commerce front ends for dynamic websites, including re-implementing static
websites as highly efficient and maintainable dynamic data driven web applications using standard accepted coding methods and practices.
Developed integrated solutions for non web-aware radio station cart programming software to deliver real-time play list information over the web using C++
and windows services. Assisted design, implementation, and administration of network services and local support systems. Developed online intranet toolset
and document imaging and archiving systems used to facilitate transportation logistics.
Integrated third-party backend network tools using C and Perl with custom-built web interfaces.
