# Josiah Turnquist

> A technical project manager who ships the code too, equally at home in a stakeholder room and a merge conflict.

- Role: Technical Project Manager at Barefoot Solutions
- Location: San Diego, California
- Email: josiahturnq@gmail.com
- Site: https://josiahturnquist.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/Josiah-Turnquist
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jturnq/

## Summary

I got into software at twelve by trying to make a video game. I spent the next several years rebuilding Pac-Man and Pong before graduating to sprawling RuneScape knock-offs. I never really stopped; the games just turned into products.

Today I am the Technical Project Manager at Barefoot Solutions, where I own delivery end to end for six client products at a time: the PRDs, the roadmaps, budgets from $50K to $1M, and the client relationship, which means being the number they dial when something goes wrong.

Recent work includes Compass AI, our self-hosted AI platform for regulated industries, and steering a fintech platform through FINRA approval. Before that came software for fire departments, COVID-era concert streaming, and biomedical tracking for an AI company in Australia.

I have watched teams fall apart because nobody set the culture. It gets set by whoever is leading, deliberately or by default, so I set it deliberately: clear ownership, tight feedback loops, and a team that likes the work and each other. That kind of team keeps its people and ships on time.

The titles I care about most are husband, father, and teacher. The hours left over go to bespoke leatherworking.

## Experience

### Technical Project Manager: Barefoot Solutions
Aug 2022 – Present · San Diego, CA
https://www.barefootsolutions.com/

I own product delivery end to end for six client products at a time: PRDs, roadmaps, budgets from $50K to $1M, and the client relationship, across stakeholders, designers, engineers, and lawyers.

- Shipped Compass AI, a self-hosted AI platform for regulated industries.
- Steered a fintech platform through FINRA approval.
- Stay hands-on across the stack, from QA to AWS infrastructure and analytics.

Skills: AWS, Quality Assurance, Google Analytics 4, CSS, Public Speaking

### Fullstack Engineer: togetherAI
Nov 2021 – Jun 2022 · Remote, Australia
https://www.togetherai.com/

Integrated togetherAI with third-party health data providers so the platform could surface anomalies in children’s wellbeing.

- Built data integrations against external biomedical health providers.
- Shipped across web and mobile on a distributed, cross-timezone team.

Skills: Vue.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, AWS, Mobile Development

### Instructional Assistant: Diablo Valley College
Feb 2021 – Jun 2021 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.dvc.edu/

Carried the full responsibilities of a campus computer science instructor, a position normally restricted to candidates who have already completed a master’s program.

Skills: Lecturing, Teaching, Public Speaking, Curriculum

### Lead Computer Science Tutor: Diablo Valley College
Feb 2021 – Jun 2021 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.dvc.edu/tutoring

Founder, hiring manager, and lead tutor of the college’s computer science tutoring department: a small team of the strongest student programmers on campus.

- Pitched and launched the department; it became school-funded.
- Hired, trained, and managed the tutoring staff.

Skills: Teaching, Hiring, Tutoring, Public Speaking

### Lead Barista: Blue Bottle Coffee
Nov 2020 – Jun 2021 · Bay Area, CA
https://bluebottlecoffee.com/

The second most profitable café in the company, trained to handle hundreds of customers a day without letting either quality or the customer experience slip.

Skills: Customer Service, Leadership, Food & Beverage

### Fullstack Engineering Intern: Fyresite
May 2020 – Jan 2021 · Phoenix, AZ
https://www.fyresite.com/

Built high-end products for clients across the U.S. at an agency partnered with names like GMG, awarded for “National Excellence” in 2021 and growing roughly 70% year over year.

Skills: React, Flutter, Dart, MySQL, AWS, CSS

### Program Instructor: Upward Bound
Jun 2019 – Jul 2020 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.dvc.edu/enrollment/ets/trio.html

Sole instructor for federally-funded computer science classes serving underprivileged, first-generation college students. I hand-tailored every curriculum and mentored students closely throughout.

- Designed the curriculum from scratch for each cohort.
- Taught high-school-aged students with no prior programming background.

Skills: Lecturing, Curriculum Design, Teaching, Mentorship

### Mathematics Tutor: Upward Bound
Jun 2019 – Jul 2020 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.dvc.edu/enrollment/ets/trio.html

Calculus tutor for first-generation college students through the same federally-funded TRIO program.

Skills: Calculus, Tutoring, Teaching

### Club Founder & Coordinator: Cru
Mar 2018 – Jul 2020 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.cru.org/

Founded and ran the largest Christian club on campus. As primary facilitator I led weekly Bible studies, hosted events, and welcomed new attendees every week.

Skills: Leadership, Public Speaking, Event Planning, Teaching

### Communication Tutor: Diablo Valley College
Feb 2018 – Aug 2020 · Pleasant Hill, CA
https://www.dvc.edu/

Selected from the top tier of the communication program to tutor the college’s world-competitive speech and debate team, alongside the general student body.

Skills: Public Speaking, Debate, Tutoring, Communication

## Volunteer

### Café Manager & Founder: Grove Church
Mar 2021 – Jan 2026 · San Diego, CA
https://sdgrove.org/

Founded and ran the Grove Café: training, scheduling, sourcing, and upkeep. The volunteer team matches a typical Starbucks’ production rate inside a few hours each Sunday.

- Built the operation from nothing: equipment, workflow, supply chain, and staffing.
- Trained and scheduled a rotating volunteer team for nearly five years.

Skills: Leadership, Team Building, Operations, Food & Beverage

### Camp Counselor: Koinonia Conference Grounds
Jul 2015 – Jul 2020 · Watsonville, CA
https://www.koinoniaconferencegrounds.org/

A veteran counselor across five summers: leading Bible studies, guiding kids between events, and handling discipline with patience.

Skills: Leadership, Mentorship, Public Speaking

## Projects

### Church Table (2025–present, live)
https://thechurchtable.com

Church management: scheduling, ministries, events, boards, budgets, people.

The centre of a four-product suite, shipping as both a native mobile app and a web app. Built as a monorepo: an Expo/React Native client, a React + Vite web client and marketing site, and one unified Express + ts-rest API on Railway over Neon Postgres. The interesting constraint was making a single typed API serve four very different clients without the schema turning to mud.

Kind: Commercial product
Audience: Small and mid-size churches that run scheduling, ministries, events, and budgets across spreadsheets, group texts, and whiteboards.
Need: Church management software exists, but the incumbents are priced and designed for megachurches. A volunteer coordinator at a 200-person church needs something they can learn in one sitting on a phone.
Angle: The wedge is mobile-first simplicity at a price small churches can justify, with the suite (Lectern, Atlas) sharing one backend so each product markets the others. I run it like a real business: pricing tiers, App Store distribution, and a unified API that keeps four clients cheap to maintain.
Proves: Proof I can carry one product from schema design to App Store review to production support, alone.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/church-table

Role: Solo · architecture, API, mobile, web, infrastructure
Stack: React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Vite, Express, ts-rest, Neon Postgres, Railway

### Church Lectern (2026, live)
https://churchlectern.com

A sermon writing app with an AI council of theologians reading over your shoulder.

A Notion-style editor for preachers, with a live council (Augustine, Lewis, Spurgeon, Calvin, Bonhoeffer) generating structured suggestions anchored to specific passages in the draft. Sermon "intent" tagging changes how the council critiques, so a pastoral message is judged as one rather than as failed expository preaching. Includes a scripture reader that inserts verses at the cursor, hover popovers on detected references, and an embedded Church Atlas timeline. Commercial product with free and paid tiers through Stripe.

Kind: Commercial product
Audience: Preachers, ministry leaders, and teachers who write expository or pastoral sermons every single week.
Need: Sermon prep tools are either generic note apps with no understanding of scripture, or study suites that cost hundreds of dollars. Nothing critiques a draft the way a trusted reader would.
Angle: The AI council is the moat: reviewers in the voice of Augustine, Lewis, or Spurgeon, anchored to specific passages, with intent tagging so a comfort-focused message is not graded as failed exegesis. A free tier for reach, a Pro tier through Stripe, and the embedded Atlas timeline cross-sells the suite.
Proves: The deepest AI product work I have shipped: structured LLM output, prompt-driven personas, and billing, end to end.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/church-lectern

Role: Solo · product, editor, AI council, billing
Stack: React, TypeScript, TipTap, Tailwind, Stripe, Neon Postgres, Railway

### Realms of Eldermyr (2026, live)
https://eldermyr-production.up.railway.app/

An online-only, server-authoritative multiplayer action-RPG.

One shared 347×291-tile realm in concentric difficulty rings, from a safe home Vale out to a lethal Frontier. Every sprite, sound effect, and piece of music is generated in code; there are no art assets anywhere in the project. The single-player simulation compiles to one artifact that the server loads headlessly and orchestrates for every connected player, so client and server run provably identical logic.

Kind: Just for fun
Audience: Me, my friends, and anyone who wanders in with a hero name.
Need: There was no need. I wanted to know whether one person could build an entire multiplayer action-RPG where every sprite and sound is generated in code.
Angle: No strategy, pure craft. The honest value is what it demonstrates: server-authoritative netcode, procedural art and audio, and a simulation that runs identically on client and server because it is literally the same artifact.
Proves: The hardest systems-design problem I have given myself, and the most fun.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/eldermyr

Role: Solo · engine, netcode, procedural art and audio
Stack: TypeScript, WebSockets, Postgres, Railway, Procedural generation

### Roonscep (2026, live)
https://roonscep.netlify.app

A lovingly dumbed-down RuneScape tribute that runs in the browser.

A 240×144-tile low-poly world in three.js with an angled camera, click-to-walk pathfinding, and eleven hand-built regions: towns, mines, a swamp, a frozen reach, a ruined castle, a void rift. Multiplayer runs on Colyseus with a shared-world combat and ground-loot resolver. The Fly.io machine stops when the last player leaves and cold-boots on the next connection, so an empty world costs almost nothing to keep online.

Kind: Just for fun
Audience: People who played RuneScape in 2007 and have ten minutes to waste.
Need: None whatsoever. It is a love letter to the games that got me into programming at twelve.
Angle: The one clever bit is the economics: the Fly.io machine stops when the last player leaves and cold-boots on the next connection, so a persistent multiplayer world costs almost nothing to keep online.
Proves: three.js rendering, Colyseus netcode, and eleven regions of world design, shipped as a weekend-scale hobby.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/roonscep

Role: Solo · world design, rendering, multiplayer server
Stack: three.js, React, Colyseus, TypeScript, Fly.io, Postgres

### Church Atlas (2026, live)
https://atlas.ecclisio.com

A multi-track timeline of biblical history, from creation to the apostolic era.

People, nations, prophecies, and events on parallel horizontal tracks, with click-to-pin detail panels carrying verse text, neighbouring-event context, and an embedded map. Free and signup-free, and embeddable inside Church Lectern as a writing aid. This is the grown-up successor to an earlier timeline project of mine that never quite worked.

Kind: Commercial product
Audience: Bible students, teachers, and the preachers already writing in Church Lectern.
Need: Biblical chronology is genuinely hard to hold in your head, and the existing visual tools look like they were built in 2004.
Angle: Free and signup-free on purpose: Atlas is the top of the funnel for the suite. It earns links and classroom use on its own merits, then its embed inside Lectern turns readers into writers.
Proves: A real data-visualisation problem (multi-track chronology with disputed dates) solved with D3 and a custom timeline engine.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/church-atlas

Role: Solo · chronology data model, visualisation, embed protocol
Stack: Vite, React 19, TypeScript, D3, Leaflet, Tailwind v4

### Moses Cho Films (2026, live)
https://moseschofilms.com

A cinematography portfolio for a working director of photography.

A Next.js portfolio with an admin uploader backed by S3 and Neon, so the client manages their own reel without touching code. Designed around a light, restrained theme that keeps attention on the footage instead of the interface.

Kind: Client work
Audience: A working director of photography and the producers who might hire him.
Need: A reel site that the cinematographer can update himself, without a developer on retainer or a page builder watermark.
Angle: The strategic choice was the admin uploader: S3-backed, so the client owns his content pipeline and never calls me for an update. Design restraint was the brief; the footage is the star.
Proves: Scoping, building, and handing off a maintainable product to a non-technical owner.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/moses-cho-films

Role: Design and build
Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, AWS S3, Neon Postgres, Netlify

### Baby Logs (2026, in-development)

Shared newborn tracking (feeding, sleep, diapers, growth) for a whole household.

A mobile app for the blurry first months: log feeding, sleep, diapers, tummy time, and measurements, and have every entry sync across everyone caring for the baby. Households share one timeline, with a day-review screen that turns a chaotic night into something you can actually read back. Mobile only, with account deletion built in for App Store compliance.

Kind: Personal need
Audience: My own household first; any set of parents and helpers sharing newborn care.
Need: Newborn tracking apps are either subscription-first or single-user. When two exhausted parents and a grandparent split night shifts, everyone needs the same timeline.
Angle: Built because we needed it, shipped properly anyway: household sync, App Store compliance, account deletion. If it grows beyond us, the foundation is already production-grade.
Proves: Scratching my own itch without cutting the corners that separate a demo from an app.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/baby-logs

Role: Solo · design and build
Stack: React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Neon Postgres

### IronSharp (2026, in-development)

A discipleship devotional app: read, reflect, pray, repeat.

Groups read a daily passage, answer two reflection questions, and pray together. A ground-up rewrite of an earlier no-code prototype into a real mobile app with its own backend: Expo Router on the client, Hono and Drizzle on the server, Neon Auth for identity. Named for Proverbs 27:17.

Kind: Non-profit
Audience: Men's discipleship groups that meet weekly and want daily structure between meetings.
Need: Group devotional habits die between Sundays. A shared daily rhythm with light accountability keeps a group actually reading.
Angle: Ministry software, not a business: the goal is adoption in the communities I already serve. The rewrite from a no-code prototype to a real backend was about owning the data model and keeping costs near zero.
Proves: Turning a validated prototype into a properly-architected mobile product.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/ironsharp

Role: Solo · mobile client and API
Stack: React Native, Expo, NativeWind, Hono, Drizzle, Neon, Railway

### Selah (2026, in-development)

A deliberately simple Bible app: read, plan, pray, memorise.

Four features and nothing else. Read any of the 66 books in a clean serif layout with highlights, inline notes, and offline chapter caching. Track shareable reading plans day by day. Keep prayer lists that reset daily or weekly on their own. Build memorisation decks straight from the reader. Local-first, so it works with no connection and no account.

Kind: Personal need
Audience: Me, and anyone who finds mainstream Bible apps noisy.
Need: Most Bible apps optimise for engagement: streaks, badges, social feeds. I wanted the opposite, four features and silence.
Angle: Local-first is the whole thesis: no account, no server, no analytics. It works in airplane mode and belongs to its user. A deliberate design-philosophy statement as much as an app.
Proves: Restraint as a product decision, and offline-first architecture done properly.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/selah

Role: Solo · design and build
Stack: React Native, Expo Router, TypeScript, Local-first

### Tidewater (2026, in-development)

Point your phone at a tidepool and find out what you are looking at.

A camera app that identifies sea life (shells, crabs, jellies, mystery blobs) and returns a structured field-guide entry: common and scientific name, rarity, conservation status, and a touch-safety rating telling you whether the thing in front of you is safe to pick up. Identification runs on Claude Opus 4.8 vision. Every find is saved to a gamified local field journal.

Kind: Just for fun
Audience: Beach walkers, kids with buckets, and me at low tide.
Need: "What is this thing and can I touch it" is a genuine question at every tidepool, and field guides do not fit in a swimsuit pocket.
Angle: A playground for structured vision output: Claude returns a typed field-guide entry (species, rarity, touch-safety) that renders straight into UI. The gamified journal exists because collecting things is fun.
Proves: Production patterns for vision-model output, learned on a project with zero stakes.
Case study: https://josiahturnquist.com/work/tidewater

Role: Solo · design, mobile client, vision pipeline
Stack: React Native, Expo, Claude Opus 4.8 vision, TypeScript, Local-first

### Chosen Music Lessons (2023, live)
https://www.chosenmusiclessons.com/

A professional online portfolio for a music instructor.

A marketing and booking site for a private music teacher, with contact routing through SendGrid and hosting on AWS.

Role: Design and build
Stack: React, JavaScript, CSS, AWS, SendGrid

### Van Holten Shots (2023, live)
https://www.vhshots.com/

A photography portfolio with layered access control and photo management.

A high-volume photography portfolio where the photographer manages galleries directly, with layered IAM controlling who can see which sets.

Role: Design and build
Stack: React, JavaScript, CSS, AWS, SendGrid

### Ennui (2021, archived)
https://github.com/Josiah-Turnquist/Ennui

A text-based open-world RPG in C++.

Started as a final project for a college course and kept going well past the due date. A full open world rendered in a terminal, with a hand-rolled GUI layer on Linux.

Role: Solo
Stack: C/C++, Linux/Unix, GUI

### The Helper Organization (2023, archived)

A non-profit funding churches internationally.

Co-founded and run with a close friend: the professional and pastoral halves of what I do, pointed at the same problem. Site since retired.

Role: Co-founder, design and build
Stack: React, JavaScript, AWS, SendGrid

## Skills

- Product & Delivery: Scoping, Estimation, Roadmapping, Stakeholder management, Product strategy, QA, Public speaking
- Generative AI: Agentic workflows, Claude Code & Cowork, Prompt engineering, Structured output, AI feature scoping
- Engineering: TypeScript, React, Next.js, React Native / Expo, Node.js, Vue.js, three.js, C/C++, Dart / Flutter
- Platform & Data: AWS, Postgres / Neon, Drizzle, Railway, Netlify, MySQL, Google Analytics 4

## Education

### B.S., Economics · UC San Diego (2020–2022)

### A.S., Computer Science · Diablo Valley College (2018–2020)
4.0 GPA. Founded the college-funded COMSC tutoring department and served as an Instructional Assistant, a role normally reserved for candidates holding a master’s degree.

### A.S.-T, Mathematics · Diablo Valley College (2017–2020)
3.8 GPA.

### A.A.-T, Speech Communication & Rhetoric · Diablo Valley College (2018–2020)
4.0 GPA. Competed on the Speech & Debate team, placing 1st and 2nd against UC Berkeley, SF State, and other UCs.

## Previous versions of this site

- v2 (2026) · https://josiahturnquist.com · Next.js 16 · TypeScript · Tailwind v4
- v1 (2023) · https://v1.josiahturnquist.com · Create React App · MUI
- v0 (2021) · https://v0.josiahturnquist.com · React, my first solo project

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