Joshua Gest Restaurant Technology Administrator · IT Project Manager

Joshua Gest tuxen.dev

IT project manager for restaurant technology rollouts.

I open new stores for a national restaurant brand — the technology side of it, from vendor scheduling to the POS being live on day one. I also build the internal tools our team runs on.

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Project Management

multi-site rollouts

Systems Admin

Active Directory · Linux

Automation + LLM

ops tooling & reporting

01 · About

Who I am

As an IT administrator, I own store openings from the technology side: coordinating vendors, scheduling installs, and configuring POS, payment, and back-of-house systems so a store opens ready to run. At our volume, that only works if the process is repeatable — one-off heroics don't scale to the number of openings we do a year.

So I built the system that tracks them. Our project-management and reporting stack runs on Retool and Monday.com, wired together with JavaScript, Python, and PostgreSQL against a handful of vendor APIs. It replaced a spreadsheet trail nobody trusted with something that shows exactly where every opening stands.

02 · Skills

Skills & tech

Languages

  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • SQL

Tools & PM

  • Project Management
  • Retool
  • Monday.com
  • REST/API integrations

Systems Admin

  • Active Directory
  • Linux
  • Windows Server
  • Networking (DNS/DHCP)

Infra

  • Docker
  • PostgreSQL
  • Hasura/GraphQL
  • nginx

AI / LLM Tooling

  • LLM-powered automation
  • Prompt-driven prototyping
  • Claude
03 · Projects

Projects

Echo Knight

A Discord music bot in Node.js, backed by Lavalink for playback. Queue management, multi-server support, and whatever my friends ask for next.

Maintained

Arcane Archive

A collection tracker that knows where your cards physically are — which binder, box, or deck. Works with any game TCGplayer supports, pulling card data and prices from their catalog.

In progress

Self-Hosted Homelab Stack

Docker, PostgreSQL, Hasura, and nginx on hardware I own. Everything I build for myself runs here.

Ongoing
04 · Beyond Work

Off the clock

Joshua Gest and his wife Ashleigh dressed up formally

I'm 36 and live in Long Beach with my wife Ashleigh, two dogs (Angel and Miley), and a cat named Kylo who outranks all of us. My first computer was an Intel 80386 running Windows 3.1. I was five, and I never really got off it. These days that's gaming, a homelab I keep finding excuses to expand, and an ongoing argument with myself about where AI is going. Otherwise: Star Wars, theme parks, and a camera. A few shots from the last one are below.

Long Beach, CA · 10+ years in tech (6 in IT)

  • AI & emerging tech
  • Star Wars
  • Gaming
  • Theme parks
  • Music festivals

// A few shots from my camera

A longhorn steer grazing in a Texas wildflower field, taken by Joshua Gest
Shoppers browsing racks of clothing at an outdoor flea market, taken by Joshua Gest
A northern bobwhite quail standing in short grass, taken by Joshua Gest
05 · Contact

Let's talk

Mostly interested in how things get built and kept running: rollouts, internal tooling, infrastructure, LLMs that earn their keep. And the specific kind of patience it takes to change one thing, redeploy, and watch it fail the same way. Always happy to compare notes.