Hi There! 👋

I'm Mick & welcome to my blog. If the home page gave you the short version, here's the longer one.

I didn't start out in software. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and my working life began in CAD drafting and business analytics as a contractor for a few major Australian companies. From there my role shifted toward building business process management applications in Angular, and a couple of years later I published my first cross-platform mobile app. I'm entirely self-taught as a developer. Everything since that first app has been learned on the job.

These days I work for a small IT shop in Sydney, where I've been for over 10 years, across the full stack: Node.js, C#/.NET, SQL Server and MongoDB on the back end, Azure infrastructure and DevOps, security hardening, and solutions architecture for client and vendor integrations. On the front end I still get hands-on with JavaScript, Angular and React.

On the side, I run InterApptive, through which I co-founded and lead the tech for DefectWise, a SaaS platform for construction defect management. It's the project most of what I write here ends up being informed by.

This blog is where I put the case studies, the tips I wish I'd learned sooner, and the small crucial snippets of code I keep reaching for, mostly so future-me can find them again, and hopefully useful to you too.