👋 Hi, I'm Mike!
I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm Catholic. I'm an Ubuntu Linux user, and I'm a staff software engineer at Strava. I've been at Strava more than five years and I continue to love working on an app I'm passionate about while solving interesting problems along the way!
Over the course of my career, I've worked for a variety of tech companies (Pariveda, SpotX, and Zen Planner), and I even taught high school math for a couple years as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. I have experience working on performance, scalability, feature development, systems architecture, and developer experience in a wide range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Redis, Kafka, Javascript, and Android. I enjoy solving diverse technical challenges, from fine-tuning database queries to improving user experience or architecting new systems that can handle our growing user base.
In my free time, I enjoy working on DIY tech projects, from 3D printing and electronics to home networking and Linux laptops. I write about these projects here on my blog, along with software development tutorials and technology reviews, to share what I learn along the way in hopes that others find it interesting and useful too!
Recent Blog Posts
Optimizing Zsh Init with ZProf (and Switching to Mise)
29 May 2025 · Software DevelopmentI’ve been noticing for a while that on my personal laptop, new terminal tabs/windows were very slow to start (more than a second). It bugged me a lot since I knew something seemed wrong, but I’d been putting off digging into the problem for a long time. A few days ago, I finally took some time to investigate! I’m glad I did, because I found some low hanging fruit that ended up saving more than two seconds on zsh (Oh-My-Zsh) init!
How to Dual-Boot Ubuntu 25.04+ and Windows 11 with Encryption
19 May 2025 · TechnologyI’ve been writing about how to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows with encryption for a long time. I first wrote about it back in 2020, where I described a four-part process with 19 total steps to get dual-boot working with encryption. The process was very complicated, involving manual setup of LUKS. In Ubuntu 24.04, the process got significantly easier due to a quirk in the installer that allowed you to select both the dual-boot and the LUKS encryption options in the new Ubuntu installer GUI. Now, in Ubuntu 25.04+, the GUI installer has full support for installing Ubuntu alongside windows with encryption!
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