About Josh Nichols
In 48 characters
A hacker, a geek, an all around jolly fellow.
In slightly more characters
Josh loves building things. At a young age, he played the hell out of his Legos, creating things of wonder and joy. Then he discovered computers. The rest is, as they say, history.
He went on to study Computer Science at RPI. By the time graduation rolled up, he somehow had a dual degree with Psychology. Weirder things have happened.
After taking few month hiatus in his motherland of New Hampshire, he was inexplicably drawn to Boston where he resides to this very day.
More recently, he occupies himself as a software developer, software engineer, programmer, hacker, or by whatever name one prefers. As has been said, he loves building things, and with code being such a malleable medium, he couldn’t be happier.
If you were to say a few things about his programmer lifestyle, they might include:
- He never stops learning. He’s always on the lookout for new practices, tools, and libraries.
- He is unafraid of code spelunking in foreign codebases to better understand them, or sometimes just for fun.
- He has an acute sense of code smell.
- He lives and breathes open source software.
- He believes in testing, continuous integration, and constantly refactoring to improve code quality.
Currently, Josh is working at Rails Machine, among many other things.
Some random facts about Josh
- He became an Eagle Scout at the tender age of 13.
- If you were to record him playing hacky sack, and then edit out the hacky sack, he would have some sick dance moves.
- He reads sci-fi and fantasy books like a fiend.
- He once accidentally fork-bombed a 40-node cluster before he knew how you were supposed to use fork.
- He has been known to binge on TV on DVD, anime, or video games from time to time. To illustrate, he beat Mass Effect in some 40+ hours in one-week time span. That’s like a full time job right there!
About Technical Pickles
Josh built this site as an exercise to leave the world of Java web development behind.
He also needed a soapbox to spread propanda for his plans of world domination somewhere to build his online persona and publish articles.
As for the name of the site, he long ago earned the name Pickles. When thinking of possible domain names, he just took ‘pickles’, and tried to find interesting adjectives. Since he does a lot of technical stuff, it seemed to be a perfect match.