Josh Anderson

A Little Context

I work where engineering, design, and the study of how teams build things overlap. These three are at the heart of most of what I make. I am most useful when a problem needs all of them at once.

Titles are fickle. My work fits under the umbrellas of design engineering, developer tools, and interface research. In practice that means I prototype a lot, write a lot, and ship less than I would like.

I currently work at Cantaloupe , exploring how AI changes the daily work of software engineers.

Here's what I've been up to for the last few years:

On the side I write essays and visual explanations about software and the people who make it. I'm an advocate of digital gardening , end-user programming , and tools that respect attention .

A Little History

I grew up moving between small towns, which made me good at being the new person and bad at keeping a houseplant alive. I studied human-computer interaction, then found out the interesting problems were in the room where people argue about the roadmap.

I started building websites at fourteen to host terrible fan pages. I still keep a folder of those early experiments, mostly as a reminder that everyone starts somewhere embarrassing.

In my twenties I worked through the awkward phase of every craft I touched. In my thirties I am trying to do fewer things and finish more of them. This site is where I keep the notes.