Michael Babker
Lead Engineer · Happy Dog

Hi, I'm Michael.

Army vet, IT generalist, open source maintainer. I have a prejudice against crap code — and I'm not subtle about sharing it.
Michael Babker
21
Years in IT
40+
Production applications
289
Packages depend on Pagerfanta
~640k
Installs a month

I'm the Lead Engineer at Happy Dog, where I set technical direction across more than forty production applications — web platforms spanning PHP, Go, and JavaScript services behind containerized infrastructure, with mobile apps fronting some of them. My heaviest day-to-day is backend PHP: Symfony, with a particular focus on Sylius e-commerce, and Laravel. But the work routinely reaches into other languages, into the pipelines and infrastructure that hold everything together, and into the conversations that turn client problems into shipped software.

My career started in the U.S. Army in 2005, where I spent nine years as an Information Technology Specialist. As a Data Support Team Chief I led the team responsible for the deployable network infrastructure a unit takes into the field, and I finished as a Senior Information Systems Support Specialist with information assurance security duties on top of that. As a Sergeant, I was directly responsible for the morale, welfare, and professional development of a team of junior Soldiers — a part of the job I still draw on when leading engineering work today. Twenty-one years on, the infrastructure has moved from satellite terminals in a field to Kubernetes clusters in Google Cloud, and the mix of operations, security, and people work is the through-line.

What I work on

  1. 01Backend platform engineeringSymfony and Sylius, Laravel, and Go, with PHP going back to 2010.
  2. 02Infrastructure and platform operationsGoogle Cloud and Kubernetes, edge and CDN configuration, container and build engineering.
  3. 03Data and migration architecturePlatform migrations, cross-engine database moves, and rebuilds off legacy stacks.
  4. 04Resilience and incident responseMaintenance windows, dependency decisions made against the tree, and incidents handled with care.
  5. 05ObservabilityDistributed tracing across six runtimes, per-service error tracking, structured logging.
  6. 06Mobile platformsNative iOS and Android field applications and Flutter, with release decisions driven by adoption data.
  7. 07AI and LLM systemsA retrieval-augmented assistant over production data, and purpose-built prediction services.
  8. 08Technical leadershipTechnical direction across more than forty applications, and nine years leading Army network teams.

Open source is where I cut my teeth as a developer, and it's still where most of my public work lives. I maintain Pagerfanta, a PHP pagination library that 289 other packages depend on. I spent about a decade in the Joomla project — coordinating four feature releases, building its framework, serving on and later leading its security team, and sitting on the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters, Inc., the not-for-profit behind it. I was also one of the lead developers on Mautic through its 1.0 release. There's a fuller account on the open source page, and the packages themselves are documented at babdev.com.