The Life and Works of Josh Wilson, Software Engineer

Abstract

I am inspired by how the science and application of software can positively impact people across the world.

To me, the best parts of making software are

  1. continuously learning fascinating concepts and technologies freely shared by those before me, and
  2. leveraging these with good taste & design to make products that delight users.

With other engineers and on my own, I’ve built complex, resilient products for meeting diverse needs with modern web technologies.

Early Career

My journey as a developer began in a humble place—a high school math class, when I discovered that graphing calculators can be programmed. What started as writing small scripts to solve small problems quickly evolved. In a nod to retro arcade games, I ended the class having written a full-fledged Galaga clone on my calculator—with animation, progressive difficulty, and a scoring system.

After earning my degree in 2019, and discovering that the web is much more suitable for delighting people with software, I have been seeking out as much knowledge as I can so that I can excel in my role. I’ve developed a deep understanding of React, TypeScript, Node.js, and other technologies, and I enjoy applying them to help others.

LearnPlatform

I worked remotely with a small team on LearnPlatform by Instructure. I had the opportunity to dive into technologies I had little prior experience in, such as Ruby on Rails and Chrome extension development, and quickly became productive with the support of more senior engineers.

After making the case for using TypeScript to my team, I was proud to lead our gradual migration from plain JavaScript to TypeScript and to act as a local TypeScript expert. In the process, I was reminded of how much one must learn about a subject in order to teach it, and I challenged myself to continue growing. A codebase migration like this is as much of a social process as it is a technical one, so I was also focused on ensuring that others feel empowered by the change, not daunted.

Current Work

Aha!

I'm currently working with the great people at Aha!, shipping improvements to our public website and internal tools. We're a fully-remote, bootstrapped company. Come work with me!

ESLint Plugin Solid

Outside of my job, I have had the privilege to join the Solid Ecosystem Team in recognition of my work on eslint-plugin-solid, an open source package that helps both new and experienced Solid developers write better code. Though I enjoy working with React, I believe Solid presents a compelling alternative focused on performance and developer experience.

Creating this project has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career. It’s demonstrated the value of the science of compilers in production-grade tooling. Seeing over 200 GitHub stars and over 4,000 GitHub repositories using my project has validated that identifying a problem and presenting a solution to the world can make a real impact. I’m grateful for the 25+ contributors that have helped make the project better.

References

  1. GitHub. https://github.com/joshwilsonvu
  2. Email. mailto://[email protected]
  3. Twitter. https://twitter.com/joshwilsonvu
  4. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-wilson-915192127/