Hello World
Introduction
My name is Joshua Rust. I live in Northern Kentucky and am married with two children. I specialize in database technologies, business intelligence, and data analysis. I’ve worked in legal technology, healthcare, home services, manufacturing, and insurance. My experience includes accounting operations management, financial reporting analysis, budgeting and forecasting, report writing, and database administration. I am currently in a customer facing role within a technology company. This wide range of domains and industry experience grants me a lot of cross-functional skills I can apply.
I have a BS in Business Administration and a BA in Business Informatics. I volunteer time to the Boy Scouts of America – Dan Beard Council – Trailblazer District. I enjoy the outdoors, video games, reading, and weight lifting. For professional inquiries, please see my Linked-In profile.
My website is broken down into three main categories. The first is my Blog, a weekly post every Tuesday just about the things I am up to personally, mostly happenings involving my family. The second is Tech Notes, these are pages updated from whatever technologies I am exploring. It’s nice to have a central repository for things I use often so I store them there. The last is Perspectives, which are just thoughts on various topics that I update periodically. These are my own words. I will not post anything artificially generated from AI on this website.
Why Blog?
I am somewhat of an early adapter of blogging in general. In the past I kept a blog that centered around my love of the outdoors, most specifically fly fishing. I used to keep a paper journal with notes on where I fished, the weather, what worked, what did not. One day that journal became water logged, so I decided to try my hand at saving my notes electronically. The internet was really taking off and some low code website tools were becoming available like Worldpress and Blogger, with my first site hosted on the latter. I would post fly fishing stories, flies I tied, and other little notes about the industry. This was a fun time. Other writers would comment on my posts and soon we created this niche little online community. We were out there trying to be an alternative voice to the Field and Streams/Fly Fisherman print magazines (although we would’ve jumped to write for them also, as some did). I’ll admit some of us let the notoriety get to our heads but for the most part I did make a little name for myself in that respect. Then social media happened and that blogging world completely disappeared. Like most, I shut down my blog and moved over to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The upkeep on those sites was much less, the technology a little cooler, and that’s where people were anyway. However, a new breed of social influencer arose and those of us who were amateur writers faded well into the background.
Cue some years later and I find myself working in tech and wanting to remain in this world. The best technologists have blogs to showcase their skills, although that seems to be on the wane. I am also a big believer in self-examination, and writing about your life is a major avenue to self awareness and personal growth. I have also, for the most part, taken a step back from social media but want to continue writing about my life and my thoughts. I certainly want control over my own content and some freedom on how it is delivered. That’s where blogging came back into my life, so in the end I came full circle.
