Software is magic - you use the right incantations and bam! Reality changes! It delights people! I love to delight people! Much of my career in software has been built around that premise. But the better I understand the world I live in the more I focus on delighting the right people, the ones who need it. This means that if you hire me you can expect me to be a fierce advocate both for our users and for my colleagues. It's also important to me that you know that I'm autistic and have ADHD, and that I spend a lot of my free time doing outreach and advocacy for neurodiversity.
Artsy 2018-05-15 — 2020-01-31
I joined Artsy to work with some really talented people in a space that was doing interesting and creative things with the world's art.
Highlights
- Designed and implemented GDPR compliance across a number of services both internal and external.
- Worked on a team whose tickets routinely touched 3 languages across 5 repos, including every part of our stack.
- Did some deep research into the difference between taxonomies and ontologies, and how and why they matter for inventory management.
- Started a weekly 'Feelings Checkin' for colleagues to come and share personal stories about their lives in the name of mutual support and solidarity.
Graphistry 2017-08-01 — 2018-03-06
I joined a small startup as it was about to start growing, and in my time there wore many hats. I did some data science, recorded instructional content, added features to the product and worked on automating and simplifying our builds and deploys.
Egghead.io 2015-11-08 —
I'm currently an active JavaScript instructor for egghead.io. I've published courses on a variety of topics, ranging from core JavaScript language features to advanced browser DevTools usage.
Highlights
- My course on reducing Arrays is one of the most well-received things I've ever created.
- My course on using chrome devtools was recorded years ago but routinely still gets lots of positive feedback
Test Double 2014-06-20 —
I sometimes help Test Double's clients solve their web development problems. I specialize in medium-term solo deployments where I advise on a strategy and design, implement requirements and provide regular feedback to ensure the client is getting the most out of engaging me.
Data Obscura 2017-01-01 —
Data Obscura is the company I founded with my partner, and under which most of my current freelance works takes place.
Intersection (formally Control Group) 2015-03-01 — 2016-03-14
I joined Control Group as tech lead for their MTA On-The-Go Kiosk project, which installed large touch-screen kiosks in subway stations across New York City.
Highlights
- Refactored five years of JQuery spaghetti into a maintainable and modifiable system
- Shrank startup time by an order of magnitude
- Fixed a variety of bugs that had been present and unresolved for years, including mission critical errors that prevented advertisements from playing as agreed
- Led a transition to a microservice based architecture where core server components were isolated and optimized, rather than relying on monolithic, deeply interconnected PHP source code
- Designed and convinced management to authorize my team to implement an entirely new version of the product for deployment in San Francisco, using React/Redux for the front-end and microservices for the backend. Code base was an order of magnitude smaller, iterative incremental feature addition became possible.
- Wrote a train arrival time service in Elixir that pulled data from a variety of unreliable sources to attempt to provide a best-guess estimate, as far as I know the most advanced such tool available for MTA arrival data.
Bunker Collective 2014-11-15 — 2015-01-30
I used React to create a set of components that responded in real-time to telemetry data generated by a simulation running in unity 3D. This included react-driven SVG animation and text-to-speech powered by Chrome APIs.
Highlights
- First time using React, and it immediately made sense to me. The unidirectional data-flow architecture allowed us to process a huge amount of data quickly and performantly.
- Rendering not only HTML but SVG based on state change in a third-party service was deeply instructive, serving to illustrate to me how thoroughly React's architecture was going to disrupt the front-end world.
Skai (formally Coral Networks) 2011-12-15 — 2014-06-01
Skai was a tech startup developing a distributed graph database and computational fabric. Though I initially joined to work on front-end demos, I quickly became the senior platform engineer and worked on all aspects of the product.
Highlights
- This was such an amazing technology - it was a bit like Redux, but with an action schema that was designed to be generally reducible with no need for custom reduce logic
- We operated in parallel at huge scale - millions of entities per second across dozens of nodes in a hadoop cluster, pursuing and attaining horizontal scalability
- Learned more than I care to know about distributed system design, failure modes and affordances
- I wrote the core backend in Java, including a proprietary serialization mechanism that was like a heavily customized protobuff, and various stream-based mechanisms that allowed changes to be broadcast to subscribing systems between networks and down to browsers via websockets
- I was responsible for all front-end work, building out various tools (primarily in angular) to showcase interesting aspects of the technology
- Learned that technical accomplishment ultimately means little in the absence of a viable market strategy
Pretty Smart Studios 2008-03-01 — 2017-01-01
PSS is the company I created and under which I do most of my own contract work, including the work I do with Test Double and Egghead.io.
Highlights
- Started out as a Flash multimedia developer, building out rich experiences for clients
- Transitioned to JavaScript after Flash became untenable, doing the same kind of work
- Have worked with large and small clients, doing long-term embedded engagements and small one-off gigs since 2008
Ohio State University 2001-09-18 — 2006-12-22
JavaScript
React
Anticipating and Solving Problems
Java
Ruby (+/- Rails)
Elixir
Python
Introducing Myk into our team gave us a much broader perspective on our codebases. He regularly pushed us to think one abstraction step further, and to consider all potential ramifications of our work. Keeping this up in a fast paced environment is no easy feat. This made him a great colleague, a solid engineer and a good person to spend time with.
— Orta Therox, colleague at Artsy
Myk helped our team untangle a big thorny mess of a platform, and brought it to a stable, well-tested, and maintainable place. He's thorough, committed, and kind, and loves to talk about big ideas. Best of all, he cares deeply about the impact his work has on people, and his thoughtfulness carries through in everything he does.
— Ben Haas, Software Engineering Manager, Intersection
Myk is a one-of-a-kind developer, technologist and human being. Skai was my first software development job, and I literally couldn't have asked for a better mentor than Myk. No only did he patiently walk me through the fundamentals of programming and web application architecture, but I learned every day from the example he set: carefully crafted code, clean and comprehensive unit tests, elegantly architected systems, and a deep-rooted kindness that permeates all his interactions. I feel incredibly lucky to have had a mentor like Myk.
— Dan Baneman, colleague at Skai
Test Double has had the pleasure of working with Myk across a number of projects, and we wouldn't hesitate to pull him into another opportunity again. Our company prides itself on building software with high levels of quality and Myk aligns with our philosophies there very well. His technical skills are obviously first rate, but more importantly he is completely at ease communicating with business owners, stakeholders and management about the approach, priorities, timelines and other constraints that we face on our projects. We are confident that when working with Myk, even on some of our most challenging projects, that he will delight our customers in the end.
— Todd Kaufman, Co-Founder of Test Double
Myk is a very strong engineer who is capable of going deep on big problems. In addition to helping me understand technical problems, he has taught me many things about being human.
— Steve Hicks, Tech Lead at Artsy