About Josh

I'm Josh Marinacci — manager, developer advocate, software engineer, researcher, usability expert, and general miscreant. I care deeply about excellent user experiences and have spent my career building tools and platforms that put that care into practice. I live in Oregon.

Career

I started at Xerox PARC, where I got to work alongside people who invented much of modern computing. From there I spent five years at Sun Microsystems working on Java UI components, including Swing and JavaFX. I got to help shape how millions of developers built desktop applications.

After Sun I joined Palm as a Developer Advocate for webOS — one of the most elegant mobile platforms that never got the market share it deserved. I worked with developers building apps for a platform that was doing things that would later be reinvented elsewhere. I miss it.

Since then I've worked at Nokia, PubNub, and Mozilla, always on the intersection of developer tools and user experience. My focus has stayed consistent throughout: graphics, usability, and the question of how to make software that genuinely serves the people using it.

What I'm Interested In

Right now I'm deep into embedded systems and Rust. I've been building a UI toolkit for ESP32-based devices and writing about it on this blog. I remain interested in scene graphs, interactive documents, and mixed reality — even if mixed reality is currently between hype cycles.

I also write bad sci-fi short stories. I've published a few of them. They're out there if you look.

Speaking and Writing

I've authored three technical books and contributed to academic papers through the ACM. I've spoken at conferences around the world on topics ranging from developer relations to graphics programming to realtime web applications. If you'd like me to speak at your event, see the Apps & Projects page.