About Me & This Site

Hi, I'm Joshua Pearson, thanks for visiting. I'm a 20+ year veteran of the software industry. Over that time I've seen booms and busts ranging from the dot-com crash to the current AI craze. Creating software has always been more than just a job for me and is something that I am passionate about. This site gives me a chance to write about the things I've learned as well as the new and exciting discoveries that come about every day.

Software isn't my only passion, though. Photography has also been a big part of my life for a long time and I wanted to create a place where I can write about it. Social media has made it easy to share the images that we create, but seems poorly suited to discussions of process and creativity.

So, this site ends up playing host to two fields that are quite disparate. But that's life, I suppose: random things brought together in time and space.

Software Engineering

Most of my career has been spent developing web and mobile applications. In the earliest days this meant PHP that talked to a variety of custom back ends or Oracle databases. From there it was on to Java and SQL server. Lots of Javascript kept forcing its way into my life too. A few years of writing iOS apps in Swift got me hooked on high performance languages that still offer a great developer experience. All of those adventures eventually led me to try out Rust, which feels like the current champion of high performance with excellent ergonomics.

Of course, software is about a lot more than just programming languages. There's a whole ecosystem that is needed to solve most problems. One of the most important parts of that ecosystem is how you store and interact with your data. I want to share my thoughts on some of the more interesting tools in this space that I've started using. Systems like ClickHouse and Apache Preset are really remarkable and I feel need more exposure.

Photography

When I'm not clacking away at my keyboard, chances are pretty high that I'm peering though the viewfinder of a camera. I am a photojournalist for the Tucson Sentinel, a local non-profit news organization. I also do a lot of personal work ranging from wildlife and travel photography to portraiture. If you'd like to keep up with my most recent work, you can follow me on Instagram. The focus here will be going behind the lens to understand my creative process and some of the tools that I use to get there.

This Site

This website is created using the Hugo static site generator. The theme is Chip Zoller's excellent Clarity hugo theme. It's funny to think that I've come full circle from the mid-90s to create a static site after decades of ever-more complex dynamic applications. Maybe I'll even write some on here about the tools behind this site and why so many have followed the same path.