I'm Mike Bloy. You either know me, or have heard of me, or Google has dropped you here in a freak search engine accident.
I am a husband and father. I am a programmer and web developer. I live in Wisconsin.
I am not the sales director in Boston, or the insurance salesman in Germany, or the teacher in the UAE, or the compliance specialist in the UK
If you are one of those other guys who share my name, hi! Drop me an email!
I'm a developer, linux consultant, web standards advocate, and version control guru.
I currently work for Alice.com. Their opinions are theirs, mine are mine. This page contains my opinions, not theirs. Previous employers have been: a telecom company, a production house, a nonprofit, and a university.
I can write code productively in Ruby, Java, Python, or Perl. I'm slightly less efficient in PHP, or C++, having lost the day-to-day knowledge. Any other language, I can puzzle out and make modifications to existing code, but would take a week or so to get up to speed. Programming is programming, no matter the language. The differences are just idiom.
I can and do install and maintain linux on the desktop or as a server. I prefer Debian. I've been responsible for installing and maintaining web servers, database servers, email servers, version control repositories, jabber servers, file servers, and continuous integration servers.
I have been creating web pages since 1995, before there were web standards to be concerned with. These days I know the value of good content and code that is kind to search engines and accessibility software, and pages that work even if their behavior is disabled. I've tracked the development of CSS-based design and unobtrusive javascript since their beginnings, and applied them as they evolved.
I am a husband and father, with a wonderful wife and a school-age son. My hobbies include photography, bicycling, tabletop and computer gaming, and tinkering with computers. My wife shares some of these and puts up with the rest.
I live in Madison, WI, a great town for foodies, hippies, hipsters, students, yuppies, and lovers of beer.
This site was written by hand in VIM, and designed directly in the browser. It uses JQuery for behavior, but does not require javascript to access the content of the site. It will look best in a modern browser, but will degrade gracefully to display its content in any web browser technology. Compass and Sass were used to manage the CSS.
The background texture comes from ava7 patterns, used with thanks. The background photograph was taken by me.
Fonts are from Font Squirrel. The masthead font is TeX Gyre Pagella, and the body font is TeX Gyre Adventor.