đź‘‹ Hi, I'm Mike!
I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm a Catholic. I'm an Ubuntu Linux user, and I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I have experience in a wide range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Redis, Kafka, Javascript, and Android.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011 with a degree in computational and applied mathematics; I subsequently completed a Master's of Education at the University of Denver as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. After a short stint of full-time teaching, I returned to the field of software engineering at SpotX, where I worked for three years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava. I've been at Strava more than four years and I continue to love working on an app I'm passionate about and solving interesting problems along the way!
Recent Blog Posts
Better Related Posts in Jekyll Using AI
23 Apr 2024 · Software DevelopmentOn any blog, it’s really common to link to related posts near the end of an
article. It keeps readers on your website by linking to another post they might
be interested in, and it can help with SEO. For a long time, Jekyll has provided
site.related_posts as a
convenient way to link to related posts. Unfortunately, the default
implementation just lists the ten most recent posts (which might not actually be
that closely related). Jekyll does offer a better implementation using Latent
Semantic Indexing (LSI) with
classifier-reborn. This plugin
tries to populate related_posts with posts that are actually related, but it’s
difficult to install and doesn’t always produce the best results.
Learning to Solder: A WLED Project
12 Apr 2024 · TechnologyI’ve been thinking for a while that it would be fun to add some kind of color-changing LED mood lighting to my home office. As I was researching different products, I quickly stumbled across the WLED project. WLED was immediately appealing to me because of my love for open source software. It’s highly praised on various blogs and YouTube videos, and I was confident that the software quality I’d get with WLED (and its ability to integrate with things like apps and Home Assistant) would be better than almost anything I could find off the shelf. I was excited to build something with WLED, but I ran into a small stumbling block – most of the hardware that’s compatible with WLED requires soldering electronics components together.
Apps
