Welcome To My World
Hello! I’m Josh, a freelance web developer based in the Twin Cities. I’ve been working on websites and web based apps for over 8 years. I spent nearly 5 years working working as a Team Lead and Front End Developer in the fast paced web development agency world, and for the last 2 years I have ventured out on my own working as a freelance and contract developer. I have experience working on a large variety of websites ranging from simple, one page WordPress sites to complex Magento e-commerce integrating with Expression Engine as content management system. While most of my experience has been working as a Front End developer, implementing designs and creating unique and interactive user experiences, I have also built custom modules and 3rd party integrations for several Drupal, Shopify and WordPress sites.
How I got here:
When I first got into web development, I was working for a property management company who had their property managers keep track of their apartment leads/contacts on handwritten spreadsheets. The property managers would fax these sheets in at the end of each week, then the sheets were tabulated (by hand) by their marketing manager and used to determine which marketing sources worked best for each property. Being one of those property managers, I thought it was tedious, inefficient and a waste of time for everyone (especially the marketing manager).
So I, along with the marketing manager, set out on a mission to create a better solution for the company. After a couple of network based excel spreadsheet systems, which could easily be broken by non-tech savvy property managers, I figured it would be easier and safer to find a web based solution, but the enterprise software solutions that were on the market were expensive, cumbersome and had an overwhelming amount of unnecessary features that the property managers didn’t need and wouldn’t use.
This led me down the road to teaching myself all aspects of development: Learning how to code, learning how to query a database, learning how backend and frontend languages talk to each other, learning how to design and create an intuitive user interface. After several months of learning and developing I launched my first (of several) version a simple cloud based system that we called Stratalead. After a few years of updates, tweaks and complete overhauls to Stratalead I started thinking about how much more I enjoyed web development over what I was doing. I decided to make a major career shift to full time web development and started working as a frontend developer for a local agency.
Over the next 5 years, I’ve honed my skills and gained a lot of experience on a wide range of platforms. Everything from custom Laravel and CakePHP platforms to a very rudimentary DotNetNuke site working on both the front and backend. The agency I worked for specialized in E-commerce sites, specifically in Magento 1 & 2 and Shopify, as well as Drupal (6, 7 & 8) and WordPress. I have also had experience with a handful of sites and personal projects that required use of Javascript frameworks including: Ember, Vue and React.
Free Time:
When I have free time, I enjoy getting outside (pending the severity of the Minnesota winters). I love to bike everywhere I can and I’ve explored many of the trails across my home state. I enjoy going hiking in the summer and visiting my Colorado friends to go skiing in the winters.
I’m also super handy. Before getting into development, I was a property manager / wanna be flipper and I learned how to fix almost anything inside the walls of a house. Now, I like to spend time refurbishing old wooden furniture when I can and my wife and I constantly have projects to that we are working on in our new house.
PS: While I don’t have handyman services listed as one of my offerings… if you have something broken, anything can be negotiated!