Hi. I’m Josh.
Since I don’t know if you are interested in me the person, or me the professional I decided to separate them out into two different sections.
Me The Person
I became a geek the first time I saw a computer on Christmas morning nineteen eighty something when my grandfather bought an IBM PC Jr for my grandmother. I made sure I used that computer as much as I possibly could (as much as a child of less than 10 is able to).
Fast forward a few years and my mom brought home a Radio Shack TRS-80 from a garage sale that came with a book on how to program it. That was the first computer I learned to program on (the power you feel when making your name print over and over again is addicting to an elementary school-er).
When I am not on the computer messing around with something, I am probably playing video games, watching TV, or hanging out with my friends (but I am usually programming something).
I have been married to my wonderful wife Jessica since 2007. When we got married we relocated to southwest Michigan for her for “the man” (I did not have a grown up job yet). Since then she freed herself from the clutches of “the man” and is now a wedding planner. I also helped her create a group marketing initiative for the local wedding industry called Fresh Coast Weddings. You should check that out. I made a pretty cool wedding venue finder.
Me The Professional
So professionally I have been programming for just over 3 years. Most of that time has been spent using PHP to create and use eCommerce systems.
I was apart of a team that developed a customized eCommerce platform for a number of clients. We made websites for sites that sold a wide array of products including boat seats, framed artwork, OEM boating parts, bike parts, bike clothing, athletic shoes, and even ephedra products.
During this time I created a number of custom systems including:
- Advanced stock tracking that had a ton of configuration options
- All sorts of customized shipping systems (something I have learned is a very personal thing for a company — nobody has “normal” shipping needs)
- Integration with a lot of different ERP systems
- Keep inventory in sync with eBay
- A “box calculator” that takes a customers order and places it into a box in 3D so that you know what box the order would ship out of so they could have incredibly accurate shipping estimates.
When Magento was released we found that it was a more feature rich platform and it made sense for us to add that we learn and support this platform as well and let our clients decide the platform they want. So in late 2009 we began working with Magento.
Working with Magento in the beginning is a beast. However, I was able to help our Magento clients do a lot of different things including
- Create a customized search engine to help customers find the most relevant products based on their search query.
- Imported 150,000 SKUs from an old system to Magento
- Imported 2 years of orders from the old system to Magento
- Imported 6+ years of customer accounts from the old system to Magento
- Created customized landing pages that had custom functionality
- A ton of little scripts to accomplish a lot of different tasks from correcting product data irregularities to setting up custom sales
