I'm Joel Ramos.

 

I take things apart.

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Toys first. I was maybe six, and the record on putting them back together was somewhere around fifty percent. My parents took it well. Since then it's been guitars, cameras, N64 cartridges, film scanners, and a lot of production workflows that seemed fine until you looked closely.

I grew up in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. I've been in Boston since 2018, where I run production for course design at Harvard Extension School. Twelve years in higher ed now, which surprises me every time I say it out loud.

The job title suggests I move spreadsheets around. What I actually do is manage friction. There's a gap between a raw idea and a finished frame, and the gap is where everything goes wrong: the vague note from a stakeholder, the spec nobody wrote down, the handoff that drops. I live in that gap. I've built systems that cut turnaround time by 70%, and I still think the interesting part isn't the number, it's that nobody had bothered to look.

Outside of work I play guitar badly and loudly, collect cartridges I'll never finish, and scan my parents' wedding photos one at a time.

If you've got something taken apart on the table and no clear plan for reassembly, that's my favorite place to start. Email's below.