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.

I'm the Lead Engineer at Happy Dog, where I set technical direction for web platforms that span 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.

Before software was a career, I spent nine years in the U.S. Army as an Information Technology Specialist, working through roles from Help Desk Team Leader to Senior Information Systems Support Specialist and Information Assurance Security Officer. 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. Two decades into an IT career, that blend of operations, security, and people work is the through-line.

Open source is where I cut my teeth as a developer. I spent years contributing to Joomla — coordinating four 3.x feature releases and dozens of maintenance releases, serving on its security team, and serving on the Board of Directors of Open Source Matters, Inc., the not-for-profit that supports the project. These days my contributions live in the PHP ecosystem around Doctrine and Symfony, and I maintain a suite of packages including Pagerfanta and PagerfantaBundle (a pagination library and Symfony bundle widely used across the PHP community) and WebSocketBundle.