Joshua

CTO - Encamp

2022 - present

Encamp is the end-to-end environmental compliance platform. I run product, engineering, and compliance. Our product helps companies understand, manage and comply with environmental regulations. We work on hard problems - integrating with 100+ government agencies, processing complex regulatory documents, and delivering reports that keep emergency responders safe. We make sense of our customer's environmental data.

The company has a mission that is important - make what's good for business good for the environment. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build systems that scale and reliably connect to a vast surface area of third party government agencies, how to keep our team productive, and how to push the boundaries of what's possible with modern tooling.

I'm particularly interested in AI-native development workflows. I've been experimenting with tools like Cursor, claude-4-opus, and building development environments that let us move faster while maintaining quality. The goal is to find the sweet spot where new technology amplifies human capability rather than replacing it.

We use TypeScript, React, Node.js, Postgres, Apollo GraphQL, and a bunch of AWS services. Everything is containerized, well-tested, and designed to handle the complexity of regulatory compliance at scale.

What I think about

How to hire the best people to build our product. The parts of software that hold the most inertia - data model, public APIs (I'm a student of Will Larson). Being a good mentor and boss while maintaining high standards for throughput. Staying close to building the product - UX matters, our tools matter, our process matters. Researching and building with the AI-native stack as frontier models get better and better.

Owner & Principal Engineer - OpenCourse.app

2018 - 2022

Built an open source education platform from scratch. The idea was to create beautiful, intelligent study sessions with course-building tools and resource discovery. I focused on offline-first architecture and mobile-friendly design while keeping it compatible with basically every browser.

The whole thing was containerized and deployed with Docker Swarm. I used Terraform for infrastructure and Ansible for provisioning. React PWA on the frontend, GraphQL with Apollo for state management, Postgres for data, and a bunch of observability tools to keep everything running smoothly.

VP of Engineering - Sococo

2011 - 2015

Sococo was a virtual office platform - think of it as a persistent video chat space for distributed teams. I ran a team of 20 engineers building clients for 5 platforms and managing 100+ servers handling millions of audio minutes per week.

The real challenge was making real-time audio and video work reliably across all these different platforms. We had to solve for network conditions, codec compatibility, and user experience on everything from iPhones to Windows desktops.

During my time there we grew revenue and paid seats 4x.

Fractional CTO / Founding Engineer

2015 - 2022

Worked with companies to build products the right way from the start. I focused on automated testing, build automation, and sustainable development practices. The goal was always to set teams up for long-term success rather than just shipping something quickly.

Mac & Web Technical Lead - Sococo

2009 - 2011

Started as the principal web developer, then moved over to build and launch the Mac desktop client. Also built all of Sococo's internal tools for monitoring customer deployments and tracking metrics.

Director, Commercial Operations - IronRidge

2004 - 2009

Managed delivery of large commercial solar projects - everything from municipal power plants to custom rooftop systems. I worked with the executive team on strategy and managed a small team of engineers developing products in a competitive industrial marketplace.

The work involved creating partnerships with vendors in China and the US, handling contract negotiations, prototyping, and figuring out how to scale manufacturing and delivery.