Josh Hellawell, standing on a bridge over a canal on a sunny day

Hi, my name is Josh, and I’m a software engineer. Like many engineers, I was born with a predisposition to prefer numbers over words, so please forgive me if the writing on this website is not up to your usual standards. I’m hoping it will get better with time.

By day I’m a backend engineer, with a focus on supporting the growth of startups: serverless architecture, Go and AWS. Maths is where my strengths seem to lie, which is why most of what I write here will be about economics, probability and other neighbouring topics. Most of it will have started life as a question I couldn’t stop thinking about. Sometimes that question makes it out of my head and onto paper, where it either dies a noble death as I forget it ever existed, or I keep mulling it over until it turns into something worth sharing.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what made me want to start a personal website if I’m so bad at writing. Good question. Other than the risk of public humiliation, I wanted a place to organise my thoughts into ideas, and see if any of my ideas had merit. I also thought it would be a useful way to showcase some of the cool things I’m working on. So here we are.

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching someone reason their way from a half-formed idea to a slightly-less-half-formed one, you’re in the right place. If not, the maths might still be worth a look.

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The story so far

  1. 1996

    Born

    Big day for me, this one. I don’t remember much of it, but I was told that a midwife burst into tears when she first saw how beautiful and perfect I was…

    Me as a toddler, fast asleep in a car seat

  2. Not much happened here… Learning how to speak and walk were the real highlights.

  3. 2005

    First TV appearance

    Continuing on my meteoric rise to success, I somehow managed to wrangle my way onto the TV show Blue Peter after coming third in a competition. But the real prize was flexing my Blue Peter badge in the school playground.

    The Blue Peter presenters and their pets in the studio

  4. Fast forward a few years while I learn the necessities of life. Cooking, socialising, opening new Co-op stores…

    Me and other children in school uniform cutting the ribbon to open a new Co-op store

  5. 2013

    Volunteering in Kenya

    At 16 I decided to volunteer in Kenya for a month with Camps International. We spent the month planting trees, digging the foundations for a primary school and helping with animal conservation. We also spent a week climbing Mount Kenya.

    Me sitting on a fallen tree in Kenya, next to a young boy
    Our group resting on a rocky slope of Mount Kenya, in the cloud

  6. 2014

    University of York

    Electrical and Electronics Engineering

    After discovering Arduino boards and building a few small robots in my free time, my physics teacher suggested I pursue electronic engineering at university. I spent three years learning about circuits and building them from scratch. It was only in the last few months, building my final year project, that I realised I preferred working with software…

    Me in my graduation gown and cap, holding my degree under a willow tree

  7. 2017

    Ministry of Defence

    Software Engineer

    Armed with a degree in electronics and a new-found love of software, I joined the Ministry of Defence as a software engineer. My main project was a data pipeline in Go and Kafka that chewed through thousands of packets a second, with a compression engine I designed to keep the storage costs down. I also led the build of a public-facing web app for outreach programmes: my first taste of making something strangers would actually use.

  8. 2019

    Ice Travel Group

    Backend Software Engineer, Leeds

    Next, a travel startup in Leeds, which I joined in its early days, when anything that needed building needed building yesterday. I built the APIs that connected us to travel partners such as easyJet, lastminute.com and OnTheBeach, added a caching layer to make the whole thing quicker, and built an internal tool that let partners bid for ad space in real time.

  9. 2020

    Founded a property company

    Director

    As Covid hit, a couple of beaten-up shops were available for sale in my local village. The price was too good to pass up, so I ended up buying them, and forming a company to operate under. You might think that renovating them during a global pandemic would be the biggest challenge… You’d be wrong. The biggest challenge was stripping the woodchip wallpaper off every possible surface.

  10. 2021

    Huler

    Backend Software Engineer, Stoke-on-Trent

    Then Huler, and my first proper go at serverless. As part of a small backend team I wrote services in Go on AWS Lambda and API Gateway, designed single-table structures in DynamoDB (more exciting than it sounds, honestly) and built new features test first.

  11. 2022

    Definition Health

    Backend Software Engineer, Brighton

    Four years working on LifeBox, a tool that helps hospitals assess patients before surgery, across the NHS and private healthcare. I built the service that lets it talk to hospitals’ patient records in HL7 and FHIR, led the work on user management and single sign-on, and banged the drum for hexagonal architecture until everyone agreed with me, or got tired of hearing about it.

  12. 2026

    Wellnourish

    Senior Software Engineer, Fareham

    Which brings us to today. I’m now a senior software engineer at Wellnourish, helping to build a female health app that supports women through every stage of life, from their first period to post-menopause. Ask me again in a year or two what I got up to.

  13. To be continued…