About Me

Hi, my name is Joshua. I’m not a blogger by nature, but I’ve decided to exercise a muscle I haven’t used enough—and maybe even improve my English along the way. 🤣

Coding

I started my coding journey pretty young, playing with the Apple II computers my grandmother brought home from school for the summer. In middle school, my parents finally bought our first computer: a Packard Bell 486 DX2 running Windows 3.1. I spent a ton of time with the machine learning, reading books, and repairing it. Some of my best memories from that time are playing DOOM and other games. I even bought books to try to make DOOM mods. I never released anything, but it’s where I really got started.

Around that time, we moved for my father’s job to Worcester, MA. Surprisingly, the school district had a really good computer program, even though most of the machines were IBM monochrome boxes. In high school, I learned BASIC, hand-writing code on graph paper; then Pascal; and later C++ in Mr. Q’s class.

My dad was transferred back to Ohio, and the school system there didn’t offer much, so I kept teaching myself—tinkering with whatever I could. Eventually, I decided what I wanted to do and went to ITT Technical Institute for programming. Up until then, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to work with computers or go into herpetology.

Work

By trade, I’m a Software Architect 3 with Hyland Software in Cleveland, Ohio, where I’ve worked since July 2010. I started in the Quality Assurance department to get my foot in the door. I was already comfortable writing code, but I hadn’t finished my degree at ITT yet. (Side note: for all the issues with ITT, there were a lot of amazing teachers there. Personally, I used it to get the piece of paper to open doors.)

I officially worked in QA for a little over a year. I was then pulled onto a special project integrating with Microsoft Dynamics as part of the WorkView team, and eventually got the chance to take the developer test and move into development.

WorkView is a cool product. At its core, it lets you build CRUD applications without writing code. It has two main parts: the schema designer, which defines the database tables, and the user interface designer. I worked across most of the product and consider myself an expert in its code and features. Most notably, I built a good portion of the WPF Unity implementation for opening objects natively, designed and built the WYSIWYG editor used in OnBase Studio, and created the unified object viewer—the same codebase for both desktop and web.

I also worked on the Unity Forms product for a while, and then helped build the OnBase App Builder with teammates from the WorkView, Workflow, and Unity Forms teams.

Chaos

I’m the father of three kids—two stepchildren and one biological daughter—and I don’t think of them as “step” anything; they’re my children. I met their mother in 2019 and married her in 2022. It’s been amazing, and complete chaos all at once. Any parent with kids in sports and band can attest that it’s almost impossible to get anything done when you have practices five nights a week, games on the weekend in two different locations, and two working parents.

On top of that, we have two dogs, three cats, four snakes, a turtle, and a giant tortoise. All of them take time and energy to care for properly.

Closing

Going forward, this blog will be my home base for the things I make and learn: I’ll write about software and architecture, share (and occasionally sell) the apps I build, document my home automation experiments (and misadventures), and jot down general life notes from the chaos of kids, pets, and projects. If any of that sounds interesting, stick around—updates will be honest, practical, and hopefully useful.