I love programming because it's the one place where the abstract reifies into the physical. It's like magic - you have some concepts, and you identify and name the ways in which they relate. Then you can empower people to change their worlds by allowing them to interact with those relations. My goal as a developer is to make the intangible tangible and help people seize and shape their reality.
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.
Test Double 2014-06-20 —
I 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.
Shutterstock 2017-03-20 — 2017-06-16
I worked as part of a small team charged with creating a component library that satisfied all internal teams.
Highlights
- Created CLI tools to generate 80% of component creation, testing and rendering.
- Ensured examples were well-documented and easy to use
- Completed ahead of schedule, to everyone's satisfaction.
Clarivoy 2016-12-20 — 2017-03-15
I was tasked with designing and implementing a tool that allowed users to upload excel and csv documents with their own schemas into a standardized output schema. I used react with redux to allow users to specify mappings between their columns and the required output columns, and performed various validation and verification operations to make the operation as smooth, seamless and reusable as possible.
Highlights
- Helped iteratively design the requirements for a customer-facing tool by providing weekly prototypes and usage feedback.
- Created innovative components to expose complex functionality in a straightforward way.
- Integrated a stand-alone tool into an existing distributed web application
Deque University 2016-08-13 — 2016-12-08
The client needed a set of reference implementations of accessible web components to serve as both (1) demonstrations of how to implement accessibility standards and (2) an npm-installable library of production-ready widgets that could be pulled into new projects.
Highlights
- Implemented a variety of a11y specifications, including subtle keyboard support and screen reader hooks often ignored by developers.
- Engineered a build configuration that allowed the widgets to be published with example usage into a tutorial environment but also as importable items in an npm library.
Occidental Petroleum 2014-09-15 — 2014-10-30
The client needed a highly customized, feature-rich data grid that would perform well with a large amount of data flowing through it.
Highlights
- Worked on a small team of consultants to build out a complex data grid for use in orchestrating global operations.
- Specialized in writing angular directives that augmented existing code to add subtle, high-performing features via declarative decoration.
Nortec Humidifiers 2014-06-20 — 2014-09-01
The client had a variety of large industrial humidifiers, each of which had a slightly different user interface exposed via a digital touchscreen embedded in the device. For training and sales purposes they wanted the ability to create browser-based emulators of the touch screens so that prospective customers could experience their interface prior to making a purchase.
Highlights
- Built out a config-driven emulator of a touch-screen embedded hardware interface for controlling industrial grade humidifiers
- Designed an architecture which allowed new devices to be created and fully wired up through the addition of simple JSON configuration
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 —
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
Angular 1.x
Java
Node
Express
Elixir
Python
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, coworker at Skai
Myk is a capable developer who thrives on ambiguity and seeks to understand problems deeply before solving them. He's also a delight to work with.
— Will Wilson, coworker 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 deep and experienced technologist who brings penetrating insight to the social ramifications of the systems he constructs. Myk advocated for a sustainable learning environment in the office by challenging others to learn new frameworks, question their beliefs, and stretch their own understanding of the languages and patterns they used every day.
— Chas Mastin, VP of Engineering, Intersection