Hey, I'm Joseph

ProTier was a New Orleans-based desktop-as-a-service startup. We realized that our real value was the infrastructure automation we built on top of VMware, and we pivoted to a virtualization automation company. We were acquired by Surgient.

I worked with backend engineers and the founders to design and build a web front-end. Back in 2001 the .NET framework was still pre-release and the notion of template-based web development was crazy new. Most devs were still hand-assembling markup from cgi-bins.

Surgient expanded the orchestration work we started at ProTier. We added new use cases (training and software testing) and built sophisticated tools for VM automation and management.

I started on the UI side, but eventually spent time building our API, working on the data model, designing our agent protocol, and building tools for bulk-editing virtual machine images. I had some really amazing industry veteran mentors during my time at Surgient. They taught me the difference between writing code and building a product.

Hyper9 was a response to the unique problems of managing virtual environments. We crawled virtual asset inventories, then indexed that data in Lucene. We built a suite of search-based tools for alerting, reporting, and performance analysis. Hyper9 was acquired by SolarWinds.

I led design and construction of the UI; first as an HTML/XHR SPA, then in Flex. Hyper9 was the seed for my interest in the research task, and it was during my time here I first encountered the work of Marti Hearst, Peter Pirolli, and Daniel Russell.

SolarWinds is a leader in the enterprise ITOM and observability market. We built a broad suite of products for system administrators, network managers, SREs, developers, and ops teams.

I spent my first year helping integrate Hyper9 into the SolarWinds product family. I moved over to the UX team and spent the next nine years leading design on three new products, three major platform features, and countless feature releases.

FeatureBase is a cloud data startup. We're building a realtime database powered by bitmaps.

I was brought in to design the company's new SaaS UI. I also built out the bones of a design process (ceremonies, tooling, design system) and a research practice (processes and a core of friendly users).