I am Joshua Fleming. I used to study Computer Engineering at UMD. I currently write software for Kinnami, as well as study Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
My formal background is in embedded systems and cybersecurity, and I enjoy tinkering with most any electronics. You can find more details about my technical expertise here.
I have some of my hobbies and interests listed below.
I was first fascinated by keyboards when a friend told me the benefits of mechanical keyboards for gaming. I bought my first one some time in 2013, and have been hooked since.
I have a preference for tactile switches (gazzew's silent boba U4s as of late), but after all of the experimentation, testing, and money spent, I find myself returning to a humble Topre keyboard.
I discovered trackballs in my first year at university, and decided to buy one just to see how it is (Logitech's M570). It was an interesting to me, that I could keep my posture still and use this pointing device comfortably, even in constrained spaces.
After two years of getting used to it, I went and bought an L-Trac, and fell in love with the input method. I try and convince people I know to switch over to it from mice (at least for non-gaming work), with little success.
Nowadays, I use a Ploopy Classic, an open source trackball that takes design inspiration from the well-regarded Microsoft Trackman.
I've always had passion and interest in music since I was a kid. It started when my dad would play a few simple riffs on the piano to entertain us from time to time. Since then, I've practiced and learned several instruments:
I also learned to sing and performed as a Bass II for men's choir, show choir, and chamber choir. My favorite vocal piece I've ever performed is Sing Me to Heaven. Other favorites, though not personally performed, include Bring Me Little Water Sylvie, Baba Yetu, and The King's Singers arrangement of Always a Woman.
I don't have many opportunities to perform music anymore unfortunately, but I still try and take time occasionally to practice and play for myself. My main instrument these days is just the ukulele, though I've started taking piano lessons. I'm interestd in learning the harp soon and possibly giving harp therapy a shot.
My brother gave me an old and very large Dell Poweredge R720, and with it I learned about how much nicer enterprise hardware is compared to consumer hardware. Compact, redundant, and hotswappable power supplies, dual-socketed motherboards, loads of hard drive bays, intelligent cooling setups -- none of which were easily or cheaply attainable in the consumer space.
I learned enough about Proxmox to install it and host several virtual machines, and thoroughly enjoyed the ease of setting up and using VMs instead of being tied down to a single host OS. I have plans to consolidate my desktop with a small HPE Proliant Microserver in a smaller case, running Proxmox to host my desktop environment with GPU passthrough for gaming, PiHole for DNS, OpenMediaVault for mass storage, BitWarden for password management, and enough headroom to spin up multiplayer game servers for my friends.
I used to love reading, until a librarian told me a book was "too hard" for me in the 3rd grade. I wish I pushed through and kept reading, but unfortunately haven't read for leisure until only recently. I've been reading a mix of modern fiction, Japanese light novels, self-help books, and personal finance books. Some of the books I've enjoyed and would recommend are here.
From middle to high school, I was fairly into solving Rubik's cubes. My fastest time on a 3x3x3 was somewhere around 20 seconds with an extremely lucky F2L and a PLL skip. My average times then were around 35 seconds, with my times now being 45-60 seconds. My method was Fridrich, using algorithms to solving F2L, and only a few of the OLL and PLL algorithms memorized.
I enjoyed solving 2x2 and 4x4, with more fun had on the former. I don't have any impressive times for these.
When I was younger, I convinced my dad to buy for me a YoYoJam PHENOMizm, a signature yo-yo of the world champion thrower at the time, Hiroyuki Suzuki. I enjoyed throwing yo a lot, and even got good enough to receive a bit of money performing. My favorite trick was the green triangle laceration. I tried learning off-string yo-yoing (4A) and two-handed looping (2A), but the styles didn't click for me.
During the early years of youtube, I stumbled upon some epic montages of people spinning pens, and later discovered the Universal Penspinning Board (UPSB). I learned a good number of tricks and built a good number of modded pens, but nowadays just twirl whatever pen I have on hand as a nervous tic. My favorite trick was the flush sonic.