We've been building the same hard systems together since 2006.

We met in 2006 at HostRocket and ViaTalk, sister companies in upstate New York. Justin ran technical operations; Josh worked on the VoIP side and ended up sole maintainer of the Rails control panel Justin had helped start. Justin left at the end of 2008 to run engineering at Site5. Two and a half years later he called Josh and hired him. He did it again at A2 Hosting in 2019.

At Site5 the two of us started Helix ourselves — a ground-up replacement for the billing and hosting platform a multi-brand host ran on — then hired the team around it. Helix outlived the company that commissioned it. It came with us through the EIG acquisition to Pressed, and through the Envato acquisition after that: eight years, three companies, dozens of white-label brands. We moved ten thousand customers onto it with a migration tool we wrote for the purpose.

At A2 Hosting, Justin was CTO and Josh was Director of Software Development. We set the architecture for TurboHub and led the twelve engineers who built it — a distributed WordPress control plane running across 5,000 servers in four regions, serving 385,000 sites for 110,000 customers. The part we're proudest of from those years isn't a system, though. It's that a new developer could ship on their first day.

Twenty years of this means we skip the parts most teams spend their time on. There's no translation layer between infrastructure and application, no architecture to negotiate across an org chart, no handoff. Justin takes the platform, the servers, and the network. Josh takes the applications, APIs, and billing. Both of us still write the code.