Josh Thompson     about     blog     ☕️ with josh

This entire page is a work-in-progress, but until then, here’s a bit more about me.

Here’s some of my interests, around which I could some aspects of “expert knowledge”:

  • improving the portions of a built environment that is allocated to vehicle movement and storage 🚗🚛🛻🏍️ you can hire me to do this for you
  • riding scooters, scooters as personal mobility tools 🛵
  • climbing 🧗‍♀️. My main ‘jams’ are bouldering, and sport climbing. I’m currently obsessed with moonboarding, and helping others learn to no longer feel fear while lead climbing, so they can have tons of fun climbing at their physical limit, and can most quickly and safely grow their skills, so they can have more fun doing harder rock climbs.
  • programming 🧑‍💻, most specifically web app development with Ruby/Rails. Here’s my most recent project: an app that renders on a map all the places in the world I’ve ridden my scooter
  • urbanism 🌆. I’m the guy that sometimes shows up at random tuesday afternoon meetings about rezoning neighborhoods, and asks the local planners if they know about the lurid history of systemic racism in american city planning.
  • streets and mobility networks 🚋. I want them to be good-enough, for the same reason you want your seatbelt to work good-enough, or a website to work good-enough.
  • I’ve travelled a lot over the years. I like how it’s shaped me.
  • I like to travel around on my scooter. All around Denver, of course, and I once rode my scooter from Denver to British Columbia, then to Seattle, and back to Denver.
  • I like traffic throughput improvement experiments, with nothing more than traffic cones. It’s unconventional, but certainly not illegal; I have recorded a conversation between me and the city engineer of Golden, and the mayor, where they both gave me permission to more-or-less “do whatever I wanted” from a traffic calming/experiment perspective. I soak this for all its worth.

Where else I exist on the internet #

I do useful things #

  • I’ve written useful guides to help people do difficult things. My guides have helped dozens-to-hundreds of people better learn software development, mostly via the Turing school, but they’re all public and free for anyone. If you happen to be considering back-e d software development, here’s a starting point. [more examples]
  • I have helped some people make huge gains in their climbing abilities, mostly by improving the technical and mental skills around lead belaying and lead climbing. It’s a slippery slope from “getting really good at belaying” to “trying hard at 5.12 and 5.13”
  • Almost all of what I’m good at is because I’m sensitive emotionally, to myself and others, and am able to easily adopt the perspective of someone else. (Nice thing about growing up nearly always feeling like an outsider)

This is nothing but a slice of who I am #

It would be offensive if I acted like I could know you based on two minutes of conversation. This page you read is nothing but a few words I’ve cobbled together about myself, which is a mix of ‘whatever is on my mind’ and ‘what I choose to share and talk about’.

The topics discussed above are just facets of how I interact with the world,and I’m working on weaving this all together into a coherent narrative. I’m not there yet.

I value, and desire to embody:

  • kindness, compassion, and a disposition of mutuality and mutual aid.
  • Strong boundaries. Self reflection. Child-like joyfulness and playfulness. Peacableness. A refusal to endorse or employ violence as a problem-solving strategy.
  • A willingness to work extremely hard, when the situation warrents.

Visit https://josh.works/blog for more. There was a time in my life that I wrote on this website a LOT. That’s where you’ll get it. I’ve been just as engaged in the world as I’ve ever been, but in the last two years I have written publically dramatically less than I did in the prior 8 years.