Hi, I'm Joel. This is my personal website. This site is my humble home base on the internet. Lately I've been using it to stash albums and ideas that speak to me. Since you're here, below is a blurb about my professional background. I'm always stoked to meet new people doing interesting things, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or email me directly.
I live in Bellingham, Washington and work as a senior software engineer. I've been coding since roughly 2002. I taught myself Perl and PHP in the computer lab at college, but ended up on a different career path (law) and code was more hobby than vocation for several years. I got pulled back into coding professionally around 2018 while building my own technology tools for some immigration cases I was working on.
As part of my learning quest, I discovered a Seattle-based startup called Legalpad. We were hacking on the same mission: transforming the manual, confusing immigration process into a modern, intuitive experience that connects global talent with opportunity. So I cold-emailed and connected with their team. I ended up working with Legalpad on-and-off until shortly before we were acquired by a large HR platform (also our client), Deel.com.
After many years in law and law-adjacent work, I was feeling a gravitational pull toward other pressing and existential issues: biodiversity loss, natural environment destruction, greenhouse gas emissions, and the rift between the natural and human-built world. Ultimately, I felt that the legal field wasn't designed or immediately equipped to reconcile these issues on the necessary timeline (I'm optimistic it'll come around eventually...). So I explored how I might pivot my career to align with my values. That led me to the discipline of "regenerative" business, and I started looking for ways to apply my skills, energy, and time to the cause.
Through great luck and fortune, I ended up at a Boulder-based, international B Corp called Unreasonable Group, where we build community between entrepreneurs, institutions, and investors to profitably pursue pressing global opportunities in energy & environment, food & water, health, education, and new frontiers. What I really love about Unreasonable is our focus on using connection and collaboration to pursue possibility in a longitudinal way. Since that all sounds kind of abstract, you can read this article, which profiles our work in detail and provides a much more thorough description of what we do.
Technically, I'm really interested in areas where the fundamental and the practical overlap: (1) interface and experience design, (2) clean and simple domain modeling, (3) internal tools that empower teamwork and add to work's "enjoyability", and (4) applying information technology outside of typical "tech" contexts. Coming from a non-code background, applying beginner's mind to technical topics feels very natural, fun, and rewarding to me. I try to be as tool agnostic as possible, but I'm a sucker for simple HTML/CSS + Ruby/Rails web-based applications and minimalist design principles. I'm also very comfortable diving into new technologies and feel comfortable moving all the way up and down the proverbial "stack".
Outside of work, I like to garden, walk, cycle, sail small boats, and read. 私はまた、書き言葉の日本語を学んでいます。You can also find me on GitHub.