1998 in the NOW lab at UC Berkeley
I’ve had a lot of odd jobs since I was very young, but this list covers my career in the tech industry:
UC Berkeley Computer Science Department (1996-1998)
Research Assistant, NOW / Millennium Research Group
Microsoft Research (1998)
Intern, Bay Area Research Center (BARC)
Inktomi (1999)
Software Engineer, Traffic Server
Scale Eight (1999-2003)
Founder, CTO, Director
Shut down in 2003.
Internet Archive (non-profit) (2003-2004)
VP/Director of Engineering Operations
Berkeley Data Systems (Mozy) (2005-2007)
Founder, CEO
Sold to EMC for $76 million in 2007.
Brigham Young University (Computer Science Department (2008-2010)
Adjunct Instructor (CS405 Intro to Venture Startups)
Instructure, Inc. (2010-2020)
CEO, Executive Chairman
IPO on NYSE in 2015
Sold to Thoma Bravo for $1.9 Billion in 2020
B. H. Roberts Foundation (2020-Present)
Executive Director
University of California, Berkeley
BA Computer Science (1998)
2023 National Current and Former LDS Survey
I didn't end up pursuing a career in academia, but I've published a few papers over the years. The recent ones are research related to my work at the B. H. Roberts Foundation. The early ones came out of a project where we broke the world record in data sorting — we sorted 1 million, 100 byte records in 1.18 seconds, disk to disk on a cluster of Pentium machines. It was pretty neat at the time. (Also see my Google Scholar profile.)
Omissive Bias in Religious Representation: Benchmarking LLM Answers to Everyday Ethical Decision-making. David Wingate, Sheryl Carty, Joshua Coates, Daniel Feldman, Nancy Fulda, Larry Howell, Brett Israelsen, et al., arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24319, 2026
When AI Takes Sides on Questions of Faith: Persistent Asymmetries in AI-Mediated Faith Guidance. Brett Israelsen, Sheryl Carty, Josh Coates, Nancy Fulda, Julie Park, and Pete Whiting, arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.22975, 2026
2026 Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey Methodology. Stephen Cranney and Joshua Coates, B. H. Roberts Foundation, 2026
A Combinatorial Approach to Modeling All Possible Golden Plates. Josh Coates, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, Vol. 66, 2025
Temple Marriages Are Less Likely to End in Divorce: Insights from the B. H. Roberts 2023 Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey. Stephen Cranney and Joshua Coates, BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 3, 2024
Millennium Sort: A Cluster-Based Application for Windows NT Using DCOM, River Primitives, and the Virtual Interface Architecture. Philip Buonadonna, Joshua Coates, Spencer Low, and David E. Culler, University of California, Berkeley, In Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Windows NT Symposium, July, 1999
Performance/Price Sort and PennySort. Jim Gray, Joshua Coates, and Chris Nyberg, Microsoft Technical Report MS-TR-98-45, 1998
NTCluster DataPump, Rivers, and Sorting. Joshua Coates, Joe Barrera, Alessandro Forin, and Jim Gray, Microsoft Research, 1998
This isn’t a paper at all, but it’s an article I wrote shortly after I moved to Utah. I was irritated at the state of funding in the local venture startup community so I “wrote a letter to the editor”:
Poison in the Well:Could Utah's Unorthodox Debt-Funding Term Sheet Tactics Be Hurting Economic Growth? Josh Coates, Connect Magazine, October 2005 (also see the "rebuttal" by BYU/Utah Angels.)
I don't think software patents are very useful, but here they are for posterity:
Dynamic Replication of Files in a Network Storage System; Patent Number 7203731; Filing Date 12/29/00; Issued Date 4/10/07
Methods and Apparatus for Accessing Remote Storage in a Distributed Storage Cluster Architecture; Patent Number 6952737; Filing Date 12/29/00; Issued Date 10/04/05