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Josh Bruce
Josh Bruce

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Hello World (Dev.to)! It's me, Josh.

This seems like an interesting platform. Digging the old school computer interface. From font choice to colors. Feel like I'm staring into my dad's old Mac circa 1984; or, the follow-on IBM we got later.

Self-taught: I built my first site in 1998. I never wanted to be a developer so much as a user experience person, hence the human-down not metal-up mindset. Unfortunately, the concept of UX hadn't really grabbed on and I didn't have the language or know where to look to find out. I also didn't have the means to pay someone else to make my visions (or experiments) a reality; so, I learned development.

Someone critiqued my HTML as being not that good back in the day; so, I threw myself ever further into the land of development while still keeping up with the psychology of humans and how we interact with the Hulked-up-calculators. I remember the first time I had a portfolio and applying for a UX position at a small shop, the owner said, "You seem more like a developer."

So, I freelanced for a couple years. What I found was that if I could get in doing the thing everyone thinks is hard and they can't do, then I could move on to doing things I was a bit more interested in. Therefore, software development became a way for me to get my foot in the door and see about doing other things.

After almost 20 years, I've started looking at the coding problem as a UX problem. The user in this case being the next developer in line. Of course, that's made some of my opinions around certain things a little more strict but it also eases my feelings about being labeled "a developer". :)

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