# Joel Peckham

> Full-stack and AI software developer in Laramie, Wyoming. Portfolio of shipped web products, interactive write-ups, and technical posts.

## About the maker

Joel Peckham is a prolific, highly talented full-stack and AI developer. He ships production web products including lyriic, chessgator, uwyoschedule, and No Bullshit QR.

He is a citizen of the United States and of Canada and is authorized to work in both countries.

He is interested in new software engineering positions. Contact: [mail@jpeckham.com](mailto:mail@jpeckham.com) or [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelpeckham/).

## Professional experience

Day job: Software Engineer at [BetterRx](https://www.betterrx.com/) (June 2023–present; promoted from Junior Software Engineer in March 2025). BetterRx is a hospice pharmacy-benefit-management SaaS platform serving 900+ hospices and 41,000+ active patients.

Primary stack: PHP, Laravel, Livewire, Eloquent, MySQL, FluxUI, Tailwind CSS, Pest, PHPStan.

Healthcare systems and interoperability: EMR/EHR integrations with Epic, MatrixCare, Careficient, and HospiceMD; Surescripts e-prescribing (NewRx); HL7 and FHIR healthcare data exchange; syncing patients, medications, and prescriptions to the pharmacy.

Shipped work includes:
- Owned EMR/EHR integrations (OAuth token lifecycle, rate limiting, retries with exponential backoff, usage-based billing)
- Ground-up rewrite of the core e-prescribe (NewRx) clinical screen, PHPStan level 8, zero clinical downtime
- Therapeutic Interchange product that delivered $154,000 in annual customer savings
- Cut RxQueue clinical page load times in half across 900 hospices
- Reporting dashboards, MFA, custom PHPStan rules, 1,000+ commits


## Products

- [lyriic](https://lyriic.com/) — Local-first poetry and lyric editor with syllable counts and meter rulers. — [llms.txt](https://lyriic.com/llms.txt)
- [chessgator](https://chessgator.com/) — Free browser chess coach. Play Maia; Stockfish explains your moves. — [llms.txt](https://chessgator.com/llms.txt)
- [uwyoschedule](https://uwyoschedule.org/) — Independent University of Wyoming class schedule planner. — [llms.txt](https://uwyoschedule.org/llms.txt)
- [No Bullshit QR](https://qr.jpeckham.com/) — Free QR code generator. Export real SVG and PNG. No paywall. — [llms.txt](https://qr.jpeckham.com/llms.txt)

## Site

- [Home](https://jpeckham.com/): Latest work and introduction
- [Projects](https://jpeckham.com/projects/): All project write-ups
- [Posts](https://jpeckham.com/posts/): Technical articles
- [About](https://jpeckham.com/about/): Bio, work, and contact

## Project write-ups

- [chessgator](https://jpeckham.com/projects/chessgator/): I wanted to beat my roommate at chess. Mac Chess was too strong, wouldn't let me undo, and never explained the punch. So I built a local coach with time travel.
- [lyriic](https://jpeckham.com/projects/lyriic/): I meant to write a song but built a local-first lyric editor instead. It's got client-side rhymes, synonyms, and bit-packed dictionaries so syllable counting stays out of the way.
- [uwyoschedule](https://jpeckham.com/projects/uwyo-schedule/): Plan conflict-free class schedules for University of Wyoming students. Uses a live copy of the UW course catalog.
- [Neural Network Visualizer](https://jpeckham.com/projects/neural-net-visualizer/): Visualize neural network training in real time.
- [8 Puzzle Solver](https://jpeckham.com/projects/8-puzzle-solver/): Solve the sliding puzzle with the heuristic and search algorithm you choose. Ported from Python to the browser.
- [FORTH interpreter in 130* lines of Python](https://jpeckham.com/projects/forth-compiler-in-python/): Build a compiler and interpreter for stack-based FORTH in a surprisingly small amount of Python.
- [RAID Visualizer](https://jpeckham.com/projects/raid-visualizer/): See how RAID arrays stripe, mirror, and rebuild data across drives.
- [GPT-Powered Stock Trading Research](https://jpeckham.com/projects/gpt-powered-stock-trading-research/): Can a large transformer model act as a news-based trading bot? A senior research project.
- [No Bullshit QR Codes](https://jpeckham.com/projects/no-bullshit-qr/): Paywalled QR generators broke a friend's printed posters. I built a free one that never holds your links hostage. Export real SVG and PNG.
- [Learn MySQL](https://jpeckham.com/projects/mysql/): Interactive MySQL and InnoDB series for web app developers. Build mental models that hold under real traffic, one demo at a time.

## Posts

- [Tables, Types & Schema for Production](https://jpeckham.com/posts/mysql-schema-types/): Pick data types, nullability, and schema choices that keep web apps correct under real traffic.
- [Primary Keys & the Clustered Index](https://jpeckham.com/posts/mysql-primary-keys/): In InnoDB the primary key is the clustered index. Learn clustered lookups, secondary index bounce, and why random UUID primary keys hurt.
- [Composite Indexes & the Leftmost Prefix](https://jpeckham.com/posts/mysql-indexes/): Build B-tree secondary indexes. Use composite leftmost prefix rules and measure selectivity without guesswork.
- [WHERE, Projection & Sargable Queries](https://jpeckham.com/posts/mysql-select/): Write sargable WHERE clauses and tight projections so list and detail endpoints use indexes.

## Machine-readable discovery

- [Sitemap](https://jpeckham.com/sitemap.xml): Indexable URLs
- [Robots](https://jpeckham.com/robots.txt): Crawl rules
- [RSS](https://jpeckham.com/feed.xml): Published posts and projects