About me, Josh Larson, a guy

I was born and raised in Iowa, which is smack-dab in the middle of the United States. I grew up in a rural area, surrounded by corn and bean fields.

Now, I live and work in Clive, Iowa, which is a suburb of Des Moines.

Professional Life

Right now, I’m a senior staff developer at Shopify. I took a brief hiatus to focus on solo entrepreneur stuff — you can read about that here.

I’ve worked on a lot of interesting things at Shopify, including Hydrogen, a new React meta-framework powering custom storefronts for Shopify merchants which eventually become a toolkit built on top of Remix.

Prior to this, I was a software engineer at Vox Media. I was part of the Concert Platforms team, which supports the engineering products behind Concert, a premium digital advertising marketplace.

And before that, I was a lead developer at an ad agency where we created a bunch of cool WordPress websites for lots of small regional clients.

In 2019, my wife and I founded a startup called Barkpass, a dog park management and pet licensing software for local government and small businesses.

Personal Life

I married Bri in 2015, and we have two sons Barrett and Joel. Our dogs Luna and Sonny keep us company. We get along awfully well together.

Our hobbies include watching almost every television show known to humankind, going on walks with our dogs, and hosting variety shows in our basement.

Music is a big thing in my life. I joined band in elementary school and learned how to play the piano, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and guitar. I joined the marching band at Iowa State University, as a sax the first three years and finally as a drum major my senior year.

I studied journalism and Spanish while I was in college. Guess what? I don’t work in either of those fields! But I did start my career as a broadcast TV producer at the local CBS affiliate in Des Moines. I produced the weekend morning news. I also did some on-air reporting as an intern. It was neat, but it was also a ton of work for not a ton of reward.

I was in Scouts as a kid, and I achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. I can’t wait to get my kid(s) involved someday!

Working with me

If you work with me or want to work with me, check out my README for an “operator’s manual” about how I work and what I look for in a job.