Hello! I’m Michael.
I am a software developer and technical architect, currently based in Glasgow in Scotland. I currently work for the BBC.
At various times I’ve been a developer in PHP, C, a little Ruby, and Java, but these days I mostly use Python and Rust. I do a fair bit of work with AWS, and I’m a fan of NixOS.
Contact me
You can email me at michael at this domain. I’m also on
Bluesky or the Fediverse. I can be found on Libera IRC, with the nick mgdm. If you’re especially lucky, I might be found on air as MM6YHF.
Projects
I have been, or am currently, involved in a few open source projects:
- PHP — I was an occasional committer to PHP itself, when I found things I wanted to fix.
- Mosquitto for PHP lets you use the Mosquitto MQTT client library from PHP. I am the sole developer of this project.
- PECL/Cairo — I am one of the lead developers of this project, which wraps the Cairo graphics library for use with PHP. I’ve done a fair bit of work on various parts of it.
- Pango for PHP — I wrote most of this wrapper for the Pango text layout library for PHP.
- htmlq is a small Rust utility for extracting data from HTML using CSS selectors. It reuses some parts of Servo.
Interests
- When I can, I go sailing. I have previously done a lot with Falmadair and An Sulaire, to the point where I managed to get a Coastal Skipper shore-based qualification, and a Day Skipper practical.
- More recently I’ve taken to cycling anywhere I can.
- Photography — you can see some of the results on Flickr.
- I tried to learn Scottish Gaelic, and I’m quite out of practice but I’ve resorted to Duolingo to try and improve this a little.
- And finally, I try to play the trumpet and the guitar.