I'm Joseph. I'm a programmer living in my hometown of Tucson, AZ. I like sneakers, hip-hop, burritos and some other stuff.
I'm currently a software development engineer at Amazon building internal HR software. Before this, I was a "cloud engineer" at Unearth doing backend-focused full-stack development on a GIS data platform. Before that, I was at Amazon working on Prime Now & some machine learning stuff for Alexa.
I have a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Arizona, where I worked as a student developer for a research institute and an NSF-funded cloud computing platform
In my free time, I work on Homegames with my friend Yazeed. It's an open-source game platform almost entirely written in JavaScript. Our overall goal is to make it easier for people to learn how to code while building fun games that can be shared with other people. We do a weekly podcast where we talk about Homegames development and what's going on in our lives.
Some of my past personal projects include:
Foo was a simple twin stick shooter (think Geometry Wars) that I built with my friend Connor. I worked on some of the enemy designs, pickups / scoring, and controller support.
The basic idea for this one was a simple public REST API that would allow people to contribute to a crowdsourced database of positive thoughts. The hope was that websites / applictations with integrate with the API and customers of those applications would post short positive messages about a specific category (eg. food, dogs). Never really took off but I still like the idea. hapi.io is dead, but the code lives on.
Viper is a rapper known for releasing hundreds of albums with absurd names. I thought it'd be fun to create an app that would randomly generate album titles based off of Viper's discography. I released this as a web app hosted on hapi.io/viper for a short time and got a bit of popularity on Reddit from it. GitHub user Noskap created a Twitter bot based off of the generator, so in some way this project still lives on.
One of my earliest and probably least useful applications. I thought it'd be cool to make a simple tool in C that would randomly generate motivational phrases. The repo doesn't include a Makefile or any real instructions on how to use it. For some reason, I still install this on every new machine I get. It's still fun to type "motivate" during the work day and get some OutKast lyrics to keep me going.