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.

Currently Working On:

Helping early-career software developers become mid-career software developers months quicker than it would otherwise take.

I’m working on resources to help early-career software developers more quickly feel confident and competent in their skills.

I’ve got a few years years of professional development experience under my belt.

This amount of experience means I’m experienced enough that I can see the ideal end goal, in terms of skills and knowledge, but I’m new enough that I remember what it was like to still be pretty overwhelmed by most of what I had to do.

My basic goal is “time compression”.

Using resources I’m making, I want you to learn almost as much as I know about a certain topic, but I want you to learn it in 1/10th the time it took me to learn it.

So far, I’m focusing on Ruby/Rails specific topics.

You’ll get about 1 email a week, straight from my keyboard to your inbox.

Curated list of things I’ve written

I’ve got about 230 posts in the archive, which is too much for even me to keep track of.

Here’s a good starting point:

Programming

• 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

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

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)

Guides & Tutorials

• Turing Prep Chapter 1: Make Mod 1 Easier Than It Otherwise Would Be
• On Learning Programming
• Anki and Memorization with Spaced Repetition Software
• How I take notes, AKA ‘Add an Index to Your Notebook’

Misc 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