4 MAY 2026
Technical logs
My resume
by Michael
§ work

Work log

A curated narrative of where the work has been done, and what mattered about it.

  1. 2018 — present

    Founding Designer & Engineer

    Patch Monkey - building Prime Intelligence

    Started on the codebase in 2018 as a dwarfnode consultant, did a year at Handshake, and returned in 2019 full-time. Across eight years, Prime Intelligence became Walmart's real-time supply-chain analytics system for the cattle and beef industry.

    DesignSole designer for Patch Monkey and clients; led UX decisions across Prime Intelligence. Designed features and workflows in Figma; built them in Rails, Stimulus, ERB, Hotwire, and Turbo.

    BrandingNamed Patch Monkey, designed the brand, and built the marketing site.

    DataBuilt the ingestion layer of an ETL framework and the analytics workspaces for data-intensive features and charting. Originated the reporting suite and the datatables that the rest of the team built on.

    EngineeringBuilt a real-time analytics portal: five sections of supply-chain KPIs with composable metric objects and drill-down modals. Built jump menu navigation with database-backed search and infinite Turbo-streamed scroll across 5+ data sources. Built SMS messaging infrastructure with a Rails generator for scaffolding new messages, plus two-factor authentication via Twilio Verify. Shipped end-to-end invoice automation for accounting. Originated reusable component primitives. Led the Rails 6 defaults migration and the Rails 7 dependency-compatibility prep. Owned the ActiveStorage migration across three Rails versions.

    TestingAuthored a large amount of the codebase's test coverage and pushed for testing as a first-class concern. Built a mechanism for scaffolding test data against database and materialized views without populating their underlying tables. It is now used in 12% of the spec suite. Introduced Vitest for Stimulus unit tests, and implemented several testing features that ensure developers don't have to remember to do the right thing.

    OperationsPushed the company toward most of its internal tooling, including Gusto, Basecamp, Linear, and Notion. Vouched for a writing culture, 6-week development cycles with off weeks in between, and led the adoption of retrospectives. Ran a book club through half a dozen books.

    ManagementMade the team's people decisions: interviews, performance reviews, mentoring, and parting calls.

  2. 2017 — present

    Founder, Software Consultant

    dwarfnode

    My consulting practice and the namesake for this site. I work with founders and small teams on the early arcs of their products.

  3. 2018 — 2019

    Senior Software Engineer

    Handshake

    A short stretch on the career platform that connects nine million university students with employers. Shipped student-to-student messaging in Rails and React, and sat on the interview panel through a high-growth hiring period. It was the first time I had to help shape a team and not just a codebase.

  4. 2016 — 2018

    Senior Software Engineer

    Vector Solutions

    Continuing-education platforms for first responders and licensed tradespeople: the certifications that decide whether someone keeps their license. The work was Rails APIs hooked into a long tail of LMS integrations, and the lesson, mostly, was about how to ship code that has to be correct.

  5. 2015 — 2016

    Software Engineer

    HighPoint Solutions

    Consulting work for pharmaceutical clients: campaign sites and ASP.NET MVC CRMs, on a marketing calendar rather than an engineering one.

  6. 2012 — 2015

    Production Coordinator, Content Developer

    Link-Systems International

    My on-ramp into software, by way of curriculum. I started authoring problems for Pearson's Mastering platform (chemistry, biology, anatomy) and ended up coordinating production for a team of twenty across roughly twelve thousand items. More spreadsheets than scripts, but the spreadsheets were where I first started writing real code.