My Wife and I

I'm Josh Suson. I live in Concord, North Carolina. Where I'm making code my craft.

I came to coding a lot later in life than I should have. Many teachers, mentors, and friends told me that I should pursue a career in software engineering but I always had my mind set on something else. In 2019, after my wife quit her job to be a stay at home and I was fired from my own job, I finally turned my eyes towards coding full time. After tinkering with code and websites for years, dating all the way back to my own Dragonball Z site on Geocities, I finally set my eyes on programming full time. The rest is history.

Very quickly coding was more than a job for me. I fell in love with the creative yet technical process. Suddenly, I found something I wanted to do and something that could take care of my family. So I decided to make coding my craft. I'm a Christian, husband, and father. These three things are more than labels for me. They're my identity. One I'm proud of. Coding being a craft is about these three things for me. It's about building in a way that honors the Lord and serves my family.

I'm not pretending I always do that. Sometimes I'm just building a tutorial because I want to hone my craft, sharpen my skills. But when I go to my job or work on a building a product, I do it in an effort to serve people well and provide value to the lives around me.

Rules For Building

Below is a list of rules that I try to consider when building. Ultimately, I feel like I'm just starting out. I dream of building products that are guided by these rules.

Often I find that these rules also end up guiding my life. I think about them outside of code. Then how they inform my world away from code circles back to affect how they guide my work.

  • Life Comes Before Likes

    Being told you're right all the time is never a good thing. That's really all the "like" button is. When building, I want to craft things that lean towards helping people live their life, not get likes. This always helps me personally avoid trying to do something just because I think it may be popular.

  • Monotony Makes Meaning

    This is the hardest one on the list for me, but it's probably made the most impact in my life. The best thing you can do for your life is realize that all the great things are monotonous. You're never going to get anywhere in life avoiding the boring things. We all want to experience the "good" things in life. The best thing that ever happened to me was realizing that changing diapers, doing dishes, and all the other boring things that come with being normal are the "good" things.

  • Digital Should Serve The Material

    These are abstract terms and can be hard to wrap your mind around. But I believe it's important to remember that we are not just meat or bags of flesh. We are physical beings who operate in a physical space. What we do in our digital spaces has impact on our actual selves whether we realize that or not. So we should strive to make the digital serve that material being. Not the other way around, to often our physical self gets lost in being a slave to a digital addiction.