About Me
Hi, I’m Josh. I live in Tasmania with my partner Hannah, and I am currently taking a long break from the workforce. I used to live in the inner west of Sydney, Australia, where I worked at Google as a Software Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering for seven-and-a-half years.
Quick timeline
| Time | Events |
|---|---|
| 198x | A Josh is born! |
| 1990s | A happy and mostly uneventful childhood in Tasmania. |
| 2005 | Began at University of Tasmania, studying a Bachelor of Computing and Bachelor of Science (combined). |
| 2007 | Got my first (casual) job doing computer stuff: Programmer at Federal Group. Despite the pitfalls of casual work, I remained in this job until moving to Sydney in 2013. |
| 2008 | Started writing the first incarnation of this blog. Later, I graduated. |
| 2009 | Honours year at UTas: Mathematics. I graduated with a University Medal. |
| 2010 | Began a PhD, again at UTas. |
| 2012 | Took 3 months off everything to do an internship at Google in Sydney. |
| 2013 | Finished my PhD dissertation and moved to Sydney, to start back at Google in my present role. |
| 2014 | My PhD graduation ceremony. |
| 2017 | Promoted (to Senior SRE-SWE). |
| 2020 | Moved back to Tassie (during a pandemic, wtf) |
| 2021 | Left Google to enjoy some time away from work |
About this blog
In 2008 I started a blog. For many years, it was a WordPress blog hosted on a friend’s DreamHost account. The quality of my writing was … variable. (It still is.)
A couple of years ago, I migrated the blog to a statically-generated site using
Hugo. I love Hugo, the simplicity of a static site, and the
excellent control I had over the output. But after a while I found that needing
to perform static generation was a small but significant blocker to posting more
frequently. And in the meantime, my itch to post to a blog that I have
significant control over has increased over time, thanks to (in no particular
order): quitting Facebook, the demise of Google Plus, ongoing disappointment in
Twitter, and concerns around the future of Medium. (Why not Blogger? I wanted
yet another side-project!)
So, over a couple of weekends in 2019, I engineered my own small blogging platform written in Go and hosted on Google App Engine. The frontend was originally styled with Materialize, but later I wrote some CSS myself. The blog database is stored in Google Cloud Datastore. Finally, I write article content in Markdown that is translated to HTML with blackfriday.
