Who Is M?

I think of myself as a writer who taught himself to code for the pleasure of it. These days I like to write, teach, speak, and podcast. I've published some books on scrum and agile, written some articles on engineering practices, and my JavaScript courses on SitePoint have enrolled over 30,000 students. I also host meetups, and I love living in the intersection between physical and virtual space. From what I have studied and seen, I've come to believe that the human instinct to network is vital enough to thrive in any medium that allows one person to connect to another.

In my spare time, you may find me working on a writing project or two, doing some photography in my studio or on the streets, playing with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom, taking Design classes, singing with friends, experimenting with electronic music, listening to podcasts, reading, baking and creating recipes, or messing around with new JavaScript frameworks.

After earning my MBA in Organizational Behavior, and working in technical and non-technical roles from individual contributor to director and back again, I have come to appreciate the power and transparency of well-executed scrum in an agile organization. I have been happy to practice, coach, and drive adoption of agile practices, and with over 10,000 hours of experience in agile, I hope to keep doing so for years to come.

I no longer work as an engineer, but I still get a physical thrill from puzzling out cross-browser front-end solutions, and crafting clean semantic HTML5/CSS3 that supports responsive delivery, structured naturally for Section 508 compliance as needed, with efficient and modular JavaScript. I'm comfortable working in Vim and Git, and I'm fond of HAML and Sass/Bourbon when the team is game. I enjoy experimenting with Ruby, Node, PHP, and I've been playing with Go lately. I also have a casual curiosity about functional programming concepts in languages such as Haskell and Scala.

Teach me something fun, and let me know how I can help.