Hi! I'm Josh. I'm a self-taught, product-focused, manager of one, and former serial founder actively in founder recovery. I had my first website when I was 11, and I’ve lost track of the count since.
My track record includes taking ideas at inception and bringing them to life, and sometimes scaling them to millions of requests per minute.
Though I never drank the chemicals beneath the sink, as a child I stuck a fork in a light socket three times because I was curious (sorry mom). As an adult I stick my nose in people’s businesses to find inefficiencies to make them more efficient with software — also because I’m curious. And no, I haven’t tried a Tide Pod.
Opening with a fun fact
I am a part owner in a horse ranch in Mexico despite not speaking a lick of spanish. During COVID I was traveling a bit and wanted to go horseback riding. To the surprise of nobody, I had to make a lot of phone calls to schedule a ride (ew). After a few conversations I learned that this particular ranch was doing pretty poorly financially because of the pandemic. I got involved and now we're up 410% from pre-pandemic levels.
Everything else, if I have your attention
I've been working with Rails daily for over ten years. For the latter half of the last decade, I've found myself helping startups and SMBs of all sizes transform their Rails applications from "way too magical garbage" to "wow, this is clean now and makes sense, and now I can iterate super fast!" I've worked with a handful of YCombinator companies, and even ended up as the lead of one.
I have a strong passion for going from idea to production and architecting Rails applications using advanced design patterns (see: the ones that aren't in the Rails guides) to make testing straightforward, and make development of new features as easy as they were when the developer first hit rails new in their shell. I've turned my opinions — for better or for worse — into a book that's coming soon (TM).
I've designed high-performance Rails applications that deal with tens of terabytes of data, to scaling Sidekiq to millions of jobs a day with lots of network IO, to everything in between. I've had a flurry of my own side projects and startups as well, some of which were commercial successes and some weren't.
I have a myriad of open-source contributions, including but not limited to Rails, and designing/owning the most popular Rails engine for drip campaigns.
