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I'm J.R. Hill and I code mostly for fun. (No, really!)

Education

I'm primarily self-educated. I dropped out of high school, and dropped out of college twice. The reasons for my difficulty with education systems is complex, but suffice it to say there were failures on my part as well as flaws in the educational system. I love learning and having the freedom to be curious and think critically, which is part of the reason that courses in school were, and continue to be, so incredibly frustrating for me.

I don't know exactly when I first began coding. My first exposure with an actual computer was almost certainly on some visit to my grandfather (Lyle E. Yates) and interacting with a Commodore 64 in his basement. I would have been in elementary school and this would have been in the early/mid 1990s. He worked on Dams in Eastern Washington, and was an early adopter of home computing. When he upgraded his home computer enough times, he gifted the Commodore 64 (and peripherals, and a 128!) to my family, and that's when I really became a BASIC programmer.

My language journey is something like BASIC to C++ to JavaScript for my early experiences. In my 20s I added a number of web and games languages. In my 30s is when I started programming professionally, and this added a lot of languages to my repertoire out of necessity, and I added many many more out of curiosity.

As for public software, most of my activity started in 2023, so I'm just getting started.

Career

I'm currently serving as a Staff Software Engineer at Onward, an energy, geoscience, and climate innovation company.

My longest-running gig in the software industry was 9 years at Amazon between 2014 and 2023. I was a core maintainer of the company's internal software ecosystem. I owned, personally as a single engineer, tens of thousands of software projects (libraries, daemons, templates, executables, etc) used directly and transitively by AWS, Amazon.com, MGM, Twitch, Kindle, Audible, IMDB, Comixology, Whole Foods, Zappos, and more. Applications ranged from the web, fintech, adtech, embedded and IoT, consumer devices, avionics, robotics, satellites and more. I'm not a rocket scientist, but my code has been to space.

Prior to Amazon, software was most often a hobby, although I did have a period of early web work for realtors and a home inspector.


Misc

Certifications from Codingame.