I'm Jimmy Hough Jr. I started programming at five, on a TI-99/4A. From there it was GW-BASIC, then QBasic, then Visual Basic through high school, with side trips into C and 6502 assembly, and eventually VB.NET. None of that was a career plan — it's just how my autistic brain has always engaged with the world, a story Dave Plummer tells better than I do.

Professionally, I set out to build iPad apps and instead landed my first paid work converting a Flash app to the Mac, back when Snow Leopard was the new thing. That led to years at Asynchrony, an agile shop where pair programming and test-driven development were the daily rhythm rather than a slide in a deck. I wrote a lot of Objective-C there — a suite of six apps sharing a common framework, plus smaller projects for Monsanto and DaVita Health. I left just before World Wide Technology bought the place.

After that I worked at KnowInk, makers of Poll Pad — the digital poll book most jurisdictions' poll workers use on election day. All of it was hard, all of it was demanding, and election day does not reschedule. It taught me to work effectively under pressure — with the right process, of course.

These days I'm comfortable in Swift, JavaScript, and C to an extent, but the honest answer is I use whatever the problem calls for. I care more about tight feedback loops, working software, and measuring instead of guessing than I do about any particular stack.

Everything at jimmyhoughjr.net runs on one small single-board computer in my house, on a platform I built called Roost — Dokku, a Cloudflare tunnel, and one command from nothing to a live app. It hosts this blog, a calculator for what your appliances cost to run, measured shootouts between implementations of the same service, and live status boards for all of it. Running my own infrastructure keeps me honest: every abstraction I lean on at work is something I've had to operate myself at home.

Away from a keyboard I'm usually still making something — 3D-printed fixes for real household problems, microcontrollers wired to engines, learning Morse code, poking at constructed languages. The common thread is wanting to know how things work one layer further down.

You can find my code on GitHub, see what I'm working on right now via the status boards, or read the blog.