I’m Josh Hamilton. I live in Tulsa, where I engineer for the world to see.

Growing up I always had a passion for building things. I started early in High School taking web design classes with old school software such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash before it was under the Adobe umbrella.

As most career paths would go, however I did not jump directly into engineering after high school, nor did I go to college directly after high school. Instead I took a detour through life floating from blue collar jobs such as working at a Wal-Mart distribution center for 7+ early years of my life.

While I worked at Wal-Mart I was also getting my Associates and Bachelors degrees via the University of Phoenix Online. Although I did learn a few things that I still use to this day from college, I don't believe that college was the forcing factor that ultimately got me to where I am today. In fact I spent a few years after college in limbo still working for Wal-Mart with no real desire to break free. It wasn't until I took a plunge from blue collar work to pursue a passion in YouTube & Twitch video game commentary that really pushed me to what I wanted really in life.

After spenting 6 months in full time YouTube & Twitch and realizing that it just ultimately wasn't something I felt like I wanted to do for a career, I pivoted into getting my start in the tech industry as a technical support specialist for a local hosting company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hostek.

I spent a few years building up my knowledge and learning PHP on the side as well as a little ColdFusion to break free from that job and get my first start at a real development job at a local fabric company, named Fabricut. From there I ended up learning Ruby on Rails and fell in love with Ruby as well as frontend frameworks such as Angular.JS which had just really taken off at the time.

After a year or so in the online Ecommerce of textiles, I thought it best to move on given the knowledge that I had gained. I interviewed and got hired at an amazing small consulting company Made By Munsters. I learned a lot working for such a small company. I was able to stretch myself and learn Rails API with full Single Page Application setups in Angular.JS, Angular, and React. As well as building out fun apps for news websites for MLB and ESPN.

After some years went by I found myself really wanting to break into the startup industry. That's where I interviewed and was hired at YouEarnedIt. YouEarnedIt was a dream to work at. Not only did I increase my salary over 2x my previous job but I got to work with seasoned engineers that I could really learn from. Although startups all have their risks and we were unfortunately bought out by a private equity firm, which pivoted our name to Kazoo and as well bought other companies for us to join with.

From this point I have worked at various startups and I will say they all have their benefits and problems. The main thing to keep in mind is to have fun in the moments and don't stress to much when things get rough.