Hi! I’m Josh, the owner and founder of Code Chameleon. It’s been an interesting journey, but I’ll try to be brief, something that is a bit difficult for me. (My colleagues call me JoshGPT, if that gives you any sort of indication as to my normal wordiness.)

Learning to Code

I started learning to code at 13, creating and sharing mods for the game The Sims. Understanding how the game worked and creating my own website to share the creations was a fun learning experience, and sparked an enthusiasm for learning even more. I went to university to study Computer Science, but found it a bit boring, as it was more theoretical and less practical. Since I’d already been coding interesting things, I wanted to keep creating. While I had received a few donations for my game mods, I wanted to make something that would be more beneficial, and this time, to be paid for it.

Company History

In 2006, my college roommate asked me if I could help his dad’s company out. They had been using an Access database for years to manage their company, but it was becoming clear that this wasn’t sustainable. So I took the database, converted it into an online system, and they began using it. This was my first paid job, and first custom system. (Incidentally, this system still exists today, much evolved, of course, but it’s been continually used since 2006: 20 years!)

After school, I worked for a while as a sign language interpreter, and later at a non-profit. Coding remained a side job, as I didn’t want to work full time for an agency or other firm. I value my freedom a bit too much to commit to that. Working at the non-profit led to the birth of Donor Wrangler, and it became clear that the side work was quickly going to become my main work. In 2015, I formed Code Chameleon, LLC, and began working for myself full time–which for me, was still less than 40 hours a week.

In 2018, my wife and I moved to Bulgaria, which was a unique opportunity to grow the company further. We remain based in the US, and work primarily with US clients, but the 7 hour time difference allows us to be more effective for our agency partners, completing work for them while they’re still sleeping. Since 2018, we’ve recruited talented local developers and grown our awesome team to what it is today.

Hobbies and Downtime

My wife and I love to travel, and try to take a few trips a year. I’m a regular gym-goer, nothing incredibly impressive size or strength wise, but I enjoy the challenge and feel best when I workout regularly. I enjoy riding my bike (not motorcycle, to be clear), and going out for walks. I still try to work less than 40 hours a week to make sure I have time for more important things in life. My goal is to work to live, not live to work.

What’s Next?

With a solid team at my side, I look forward to continuing to grow the company and to serve our clients more effectively, offering new services where it’s appropriate. Our recent efforts to develop our own custom hosting plugin to optimize our WordPress sites and provide some new functionality has made us excited to expand its functions even further.

Experiments with smart usage of generative AI (which itself is a topic for several blog posts) to help our clients speed up some aspects of their work will continue. We’ve already used it to enable our plugin to generate meta descriptions automatically, with some pretty decent results. Now we’re looking for ways we can add it to our custom systems to make our client’s work easier.

We plan on expanding the team a bit further, and branching into content creation to help our clients achieve even better results in the realm of SEO. All told, there’s a lot to come, and we look forward to continuing on the journey with all of you during our 11th year (officially) in business. Thank you for being on this journey with us!

Joshua Smith

CEO

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