About Me
Currently living in the great state of New Jersey, where I work full-time as a software engineer specializing in design systems. I own and operate Carbonology Interactive LLC, a software development firm where I build software startups and perform client-facing work. In June of 2020, I graduated with a B.S. in Interactive Digital Media from Drexel University and was awarded Honors with Distinction. I mainly write about software, design systems, business, and urbanism. I am now 26 years old.
About This Website
Moving forward, this will be the new home for everything of mine. Writing, photos, statuses, links, contacts, and whatever else I want.
I like to think of the construction of this website as my own declaration of independence. Frustrated by issues keeping prior projects alive, problems migrating content between websites, vendors preventing the exportation of my data, and the turbulent nature of tech companies these days, I'm driven to own every single aspect of this space of mine, from the data server to the frontend code that renders this page you're reading.
The most important step of autonomy was building my own Content API, which lives at content.carbonemike.com. This is where all of my data lives in a frontend-agnostic format (JSON), which includes posts, contacts—and with the connection of a Google Cloud bucket—images, videos and files too. (Ideally, I'd have control over the file storage and not use Google Cloud, however that's out of scope for this build.)
This frontend is powered by Astro and hosted on Vercel. The Content API is a Node.js server using Express.js, connected to a PostgreSQL database, both hosted on Railway.
Meta Image
When you share this website via text or social media, a little picture will display. That picture is called a meta image. The meta image used by this website is an edited version of View of the Bay and City of New York from Weehawken painted by Robert Havell in 1840. You can find more information about this image at its page in the Wikimedia Commons.
I could've dynamically generated these images based on the article title or similar, but I decided that's overkill and not necessary for this project right now.
Stay Connected
So, welcome to my corner of the internet! To stay in touch, consider subscribing to my mailing list below. Otherwise, messages are always welcome too: mike@carbonology.in.