About Me

My name is Josh and I am an engineer. I think the world that we live in is amazing, and engineering helps me make the most of it.

I currently have three occupations. For half of the week, I am a full-time graduate student at the University of Southern California. I am studying Computer Science with an emphasis in Robotics. For the other half of the week, I work part-time at SpaceX as an Avionics Integration Engineer. What I actually do at work changes every week, but lately it has involved designing and building software and electronics for our Dragon C2 mission. My third occupation is as the Web Developer for Illumin. Illumin is an online magazine from USC's Viterbi School of Engineering that discusses engineering in everyday life.

In my free time, I enjoy seeing my family and playing with my poodles, playing the guitar, exploring the Los Angeles nightlife with friends, and flying RC airplanes. I've also been working on a new robot that I'm super excited about. Sometimes I hang out with USC's AeroDesign Team too.

To learn more about me, you can check out my resume (updated November 2011) or my LinkedIn profile.

The Website

Well, first, I would like to explain a common misconception about the name of this website. The letters 'jav' in JAV Concepts, are actually my initialst. With that said, this website started as a place where I could explore designing and coding new web technologies. Lately though, it just serves as a portfolio of my projects and experiences.

The site is entirely hand-coded by myself, with the exception of Lightbox. Over the past couple years, I have developed a framework that is currently being using in many of my sites. As of January 2008, the site is in it's third iteration. JAV Concepts was once hosted on a Fedora box in my closet, but now is located somewhere in the cloud on a DreamHost server. This website relies heavily on PHP, MySQL, and Apache to serve up pages. If you would like to see other websites that I have created or worked on, then check out my Projects Page.

Contact Me

I would love to hear from you! Feel free to email me comments, questions, and suggestions. My email address is josh@javconcepts.com. Thanks for visiting!