👋 Hi, I'm Joel
Thanks for visiting. This is my personal website. I hit eject on most social media and built this little home base on the open web instead. So far, so good.
I'm a software engineer/lawyer in Bellingham, Washington, where I live with my partner and our two rescue dogs.
Recently, I've been focusing my efforts on helping people work more internationally. I've been especially interested in work visa laws, cultural exchange programs, and technology-emowered community building. I'm also a big fan of open source software.
I currently work on the technology team at Legalpad.io. Aside from that, I handle a small number of legal matters and social/political causes. I am also constantly hacking on a personal project called CreativeVisas.com (free collection of primary source research materials for O, P, and Q classification US work visas).
15-Second Bio
- Joel (he/him)
- 39 years old
- Born in Southern California, grew up in Wisconsin
- BA Poli Sci, UW-Milwaukee, 2004 / JD, California Western School of Law, 2008
- Taught myself to code in college but never did it professionally
- Practiced employee rights law for 13 years in Portland, Oregon
- Picked up coding again in 2017
- Continued self-teaching for 4 years (projects, freelance)
- Doing tech-forward, positive sum projects
Interests
Personal:
- Different perspectives
- Nonliner thinking
- Music, writing, visual art
- Gardening, hiking, cycling
Professional:
- Documentation, standardization, testing, automation
- Business processes
- Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML/CSS
- No-code
- Natural language AI
- Experience design