I’m Joshua Mills. I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota with my wife Anna and our cat Squishy. I build data systems and software. I also write, take photographs, and cook. My writing on technology, finance, and American life has been published in the Minnesota Star Tribune, and my short fiction has appeared on Let’s Not Meet.
I lead the restructuring of data for a midsize financial services corporation with 370 employees. I build the data structures, relational databases, CRM workflows, and reporting platforms that connect information across the business. That work reaches from the database underneath to the tools and dashboards people use every day.
I grew up in Harper Woods, Michigan, a two-square-mile town just outside Detroit, with my mom and my brother. It was small, ordinary, weird, close, and everything to me. That sense of place, of knowing exactly where you belong, still shapes everything I make.
The cookbook is real and ongoing, drawn from Midwest church basements, supper clubs, smokers, and family kitchens. The photography spans fifteen years and three cameras, from Lake Superior to Iceland. The essays are about money, community, grief, and ordinary life. The fiction tends toward the dark.
This site brings those parts of my work together. The systems, the stories, the photographs, and the food all start with paying attention. I care about how things are built, how they feel to use, and whether they hold up over time.
Some things I’ve made.
The House Is Still There · the debut novel ↗
Essays, short fiction, and the notebook ↗
115 recipes from the Midwest kitchen ↗
Fifteen years of landscape photography ↗
Fossick · handbuilt guitars ↗
What I can build for your business.
I help businesses turn scattered information and disconnected tools into systems they can use. That includes data architecture and warehousing, relational databases, custom CRMs, reporting platforms, and websites built around how the business actually works.
I take projects from the first conversation through the data, the build, and the experience your team uses. The goal is straightforward: make information easier to find, work easier to manage, and decisions easier to make.
Explore data, systems, and platform consulting ↗
Websites and photography through Wendigo Creative ↗