👋 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
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.
I Did My Own Taxes By Hand (and You Can Too!)
15 Mar 2024 · TutorialsThe US is one of the only countries in the world where everyone wastes a dozen hours every year doing their taxes. (The IRS estimates that it takes an individual 13 hours to prepare their taxes!!!) Like many others, I’ve been using TurboTax to do my taxes for years. I’ve wanted for a long time to try doing my own taxes, by hand, without tax preparation software, but I always felt too intimidated by all the tax forms (and the sheer volume of information) to actually do it, and didn’t know where to start. This year, I finally did it! And it actually wasn’t nearly as difficult as I imagined it to be – it almost felt easy. Once I got started, I got the hang of it very quickly, and I successfully filed my own tax return this year, without using TurboTax! (And in well under 13 hours!)
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