Welcome!

I’m Josh. I do a mix of things, mostly related to software development, rock climbing, and helping software developers and rock climbers be better at what they do.

My wife and I are based in Golden, CO.

What I’m working on right now 🕐

Two things:

Current Project #1 IntermediateRuby

I’m working on helping early-career Ruby/Rails software developers more quickly grow their skills.

I’m doing this here:

–> https://intermediateruby.com/

I’m almost done with my first 5-part (😱) series. I paid a very kind and super-senior Rails Dev (👋 Matt Swanson) to pair with me through an OSS bug fix. I recorded the whole session, and am breaking it up into short lessons with very detailed accompanying notes.

I’m not done yet, but already I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out.

–> Jekyll Bug Fix with Matt: Part 0 - Series Introduction

Current Project #2 Upgrade Your Aging Parent's Junky Old Laptop to a Chromebook: A Guide For Technical People

Here’s the origin story:

I spent a few hours recently helping my 75-year-old mother-in-law reconnect her junky old Windows laptop to the internet. Across five phone calls, and many pictures of her computer screen, we got her internet working again.

As I did this, I live-tweeted the experience. It was about 20 tweets. A few pictures my mother-in-law sent me, and a poll.

My mother in law is frustrated that her internet wasn't working today. It's been broken all day. I've called her a few times between other events to try to help debug it.

This is a screenshot I just received (via email) that she took *with her phone* pic.twitter.com/5KnfCGZ2F4

— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 3, 2020

This has been a painful process for both of us. I’m my family’s “tech person”, and I’m going to document the process by which I upgrade my mother-in-law’s old Windows-something-or-another to a Chromebook.

I learn and work in public. If my situation is at all similar to your situation, please follow the link and punch in your email, or hit one of the pre-purchase buttons!

–> Upgrading Your Parent’s Junky Old Laptop to a Chromebook

Other Things I’ve Written

I’ve written north of 240 blog posts, which is too much for even me to keep track of.

Here’s some possible places to start:

Turing

I like the Turing School of Software and Design. It’s how I got my start in software. I work extensively with future/current Turing students, and many alumn on job-hunting, salary negotiation, job success-type topics.

• Turing Prep Chapter 1: Make Mod 1 Easier Than It Otherwise Would Be
• A Large Collection of Thoughts and Resources about the Turing School
• Build a Personal Website in Jekyll - A Detailed Guide For First-Timers

Programming (Ruby/Rails focused)

• Rails Migrations: When you can’t add a uniqueness constraint because you already have duplicates
• Sidekiq and Background Jobs for Beginners
• Pry-ing into a Stack Trace
• Some Lessons Learned While Preparing for Two Technical Talks
• Troubleshooting Chinese Character Sets in MySQL

all posts tagged programming ->

Remote Work

• Remote Job Hunting Resources for Turing Grads and Anyone Else
• Whole Messages in Slack
• So you want to work remotely…

all posts tagged remote_work ->

Talks

• Denver.rb: Using .count vs .size in ActiveRecord query methods (8 min)
• Boulder Ruby Group: Developers should embrace working with the non-development parts of the business, and the constraints this entails. (30 min)

A Smattering of Guides & Tutorials

• On Learning Programming
• Anki and Memorization with Spaced Repetition Software
• How I take notes, AKA ‘Add an Index to Your Notebook’

Miscellaneous Posts I Like

• How to ask questions of experts and gain more than just an answer
• A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept
• Overcome (some) barriers in work with this magic phrase
• Quitting the shallow for the deep