👋 Welcome

Hi, I’m Joel! Thanks for coming to my blog. This is the first post of (hopefully?) many. I’m hoping to create a blog to share my thoughts on software engineering, technology, and life. Introductions are a little awkward, since I’m not sure that there is a specific thing to share, other than who I am. So, rather than give a biography on myself, I thought I would just give you a rundown of how I got interested in computers and how that has lead us both to this blog post today. Sound good? Ok, cool 🙂

👥 My Background

So, like I said, I’m Joel! I’m a software engineer and a musician, but you’re probably here for the former. Please allow me to share a little bit about my experience as a programmer and what brought me to the me you’re reading about today.

About fifteen years ago, I picked up one of my dad’s programming books. I was only 8 at the time, but the book, though only on HTML, sparked an interest in me. From my perspective, I had the power to create anything digitally. I loved the struggle of trying to get layouts to work right and falling into HTML `<table>` tags to get it (this is before flexbox and grid graced this earth). After finding some comfort building static pages with HTML and CSS, I quickly wanted to learn how websites made dynamic content and let users interact with the site — I wanted it to do things.

After a year or so messing around with Visual Basic 6, I was introduced to PHP & MySQL, which landed me on learning to develop websites in a LAMP stack. For the next several years I would create project after project for fun. I created a web-based game where you could create your characters and have them duel, but also had to care for your fighter’s needs. It was basically a mix of Sword & Sandals: Gladiator with Neopets. I took an interest in creating mods for Minecraft and created a website that could generate Minecraft mods for ModLoader and Forge (back in the day). That website was the first thing I created that actually had any success. For half a year, I averaged about 10,000 active users a day. If I was smarter, I would’ve monetized that better.

Contracting & Education

When I was 15 I started to get my first contracting work, mostly subcontracting through a friend who had a successful web development business. While a lot of the work was building static websites for small businesses, there were some interesting projects along the way. One of my favorite projects was creating a Officer management system for the state’s Parent Teacher Association. During this time I started using JavaScript regularly and had my first exposure to front-end frameworks. I continued doing freelancing work until I graduated college and began searching for a full-time position.

After graduating with dual BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering, I took a job at a local company, MidwayUSA, as a Web Applications Developer. This was my first exposure to the “Microsoft web,” where we used .NET Framework, WCF, C#, and the likes. Though I didn’t care a whole lot for the stack, I learned a lot here about front-end development and was introduced to my current favorite language, Elm. Because we were an E-Commerce company, I had the opportunity to work with account life cycles, billing & payment processing, product management, checkout, and much more. We integrated about thirty different services provided by other development teams at the company. I spent most of my time at the company refactoring legacy C# and AngularJS 1.0 code into modern Web APIs and front-end apps in React or Elm.

Elixir / Erlang

During my last few months at Midway I had the opportunity to explore a new-to-me technology, Elixir. I worked with another developer to build an application that would collect and format all of our product data before sending it to our search provider. I really fell in love with the language during this time and read the books Programming Elixir 1.6 and Craft GraphQL APIs with Elixir and Absinthe. These books — especially the Absinthe one — excited me about the technology. So when it came time for me to look for another company, finding a team using Elixir was one of my top priorities.

🧪 Programming Today

At the start of December of 2021, I took a new position as a Software Engineer at InfluxData/InfluxDB. If you’ve worked with time-series data before, you might have heard of them. InfluxData’s main product is their time-series database InfluxDB. Since joining the team, I have had a huge amount of opportunity to learn and grow. With that time and a lot of help from the team, I have made a lot progress learning Elixir in the past month and a half than I did since I started learning in March 2021.

I’m extremely grateful to get to be part of the team I’m on. They are a solid group of individuals and are all talented. I just started my time there, but I’m looking forward to everything in store for me at InfluxData.

💭 So, why this blog?

I really enjoy getting to express my thoughts and feelings creatively. Playing and creating music has been one of my favorites hobbies for the past decade. I’ve really never considered myself as much of a writer (or speaker), but it’s a skill that I would like to develop in the coming years. My intention is to create this blog alongside of a YouTube channel where I can share what I am learning in my career and hobbies. Primarily, I will create posts of programming and technology, but I would also be interested in sharing the thoughts I takeaway from books I read as well and productivity ideas.

I don’t have a grand plan for every step along the way, but writing and sharing is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and there really isn’t a better time to start than 5 years ago. Now, since I’ve already missed that deadline, I’ll go for today! Get signed up for my newsletter so you’re not missing out on any posts!

I can’t wait to learn and share!

Joel Abshier

def blog_post(first_post) do
  case first_post do
    %BlogPost{contains_any_code?: false} -> apologize()
    _blog_post -> do_nothing()
  end
end

😭 Forgive me! Code will come soon! 🙏