About me
Hey, I’m Michael! I’m a software developer living in Dundas, Ontario. I work remotely for a biotech company based in Utah. Welcome to my corner of the internet. 🌱
This site has no ads, no affiliate links and no analytics. It’s a playground where I try out ideas and share what I’ve learned. To see more, check out my open-source work on GitHub or my video tutorials on YouTube.
You can also contact me on Twitter or by email if you’re feeling chatty. 🤗
What I’m doing now
Last updated Oct 18, 2023.
- Enjoying being a new parent 🍼
- Publishing quick blog posts and notes from my phone using a combination of Obsidian, iOS Shortcuts, Working Copy, GitHub Actions and Astro ☄️
- Learning Python, Google Cloud Platform and Vite for work
Random facts
- My first coding project was a Minesweeper clone I built in high school using Visual Basic 💣
- Before software engineering, I worked as an opera singer (❤️), an accountant (🙄) and a college English professor (😅)
- I taught myself frontend development while I was an opera singer and too broke to pay for a website 🎹
- I’m to-do list obsessed and always looking for better ways to use tools like Things as a “second brain”
- Pronouns: he/him/his
Timeline
2023
- Aug 15: Rebuilt this website again with Astro to take advantage of its content collections feature and TypeScript support while still shipping zero JS by default ☄️
- Jul 7: Had a baby 🍼
- Jun 25: Published my rough, in-progress notes as a way of learning in public 📝
- Jun 25: Designed and rebuilt this website using Eleventy (after years of Next and Gatsby) to encourage me to focus on writing ⚡️
- Apr 8: Got married 💍
2022
- Dec 15: Adding a pull request template to your GitHub repo ✍️
- Nov 10: Dramatically reducing video file size using ffmpeg ✍️
- Sep 1: The translateZ trick ✍️
- Jun 20: Joined Recursion as a Senior Software Engineer helping scientists discover new medicines 🤝
2021
- Jun 17: Promoted to Senior Software Engineer at ecobee 🤝
- May 31: Using Slack to Report Data Entry Errors to Content Editors ✍️
2020
- Jun 1: The filter(Boolean) trick ✍️
- Feb 26: Built a new ecobee.com shopping cart featuring optimistic UI and logic powered by XState and Shopify’s Storefront API 🚀
2019
- Aug 15: Joined ecobee as a Web Developer helping the “.com” team migrate a legacy WordPress codebase to Gatsby 🤝
- Jun 19: Researched and ghostwrote How The Couch Builds Websites in Half the Time with Gatsby for the Gatsby blog ✍️
- Jun 7: Designed and built lesleybarber.com 🚀
- Jun 3: Using GraphQL with Gatsby 📺
- May 27: Adding Content to a Gatsby Project 📺
- Mar 22: Joined Gatsby as a contract technical writer to help research and author two technical blog posts and an ecommerce ebook 🤝
- Mar 17: Writing CSS-in-JS in a Gatsby Project 📺
- Mar 11: Writing CSS in a Gatsby Project 📺
- Mar 3: Wrapping Pages in a Layout Component 📺
- Feb 20: Adding Pages to a Gatsby Project 📺
- Feb 15: Writing HTML in a Gatsby Project 📺
- Jan 31: Gatsby’s Default Files and Folders 📺
- Jan 24: Starting a New Gatsby Project 📺
- Jan 17: What is Gatsby? 📺
2018
- Nov 30: Introducing Gatsby Tutorials ✍️
- Nov 10: Designed and built gatsbytutorials.com 🚀
- Oct 20: How to Set Up a Mac for Web Development ✍️
- Aug 17: Designed and built lauraalbino.com 🚀
- Jul 19: Designed and built jpatrickraftery.com 🚀
- May 18: Received an inspirational site of the day award from One Page Love for the 2018 version of this website 🥇
- May 10: Built ariaumezawa.com for Coffeeshop Creative 🚀
2017
- Dec 19: Designed and built adriannepieczonka.com 🚀
- Oct 2: Designed and built adamluthertenor.com 🚀
- Feb 21: Designed and built ileanamontalbetti.com 🚀
- Jan 15: Joined Coffeeshop Creative as Lead Frontend Developer 🤝
2015
- Jul 15: Designed and built egofilmarts.com for Canadian film and stage director Atom Egoyan 🚀