About Me
Currently living in Manhattan, where I work full-time as a product engineer at Knock. I build developer-first engagement infrastructure at a global scale that powers notifications for companies like Vercel, Zapier, Medium, and 150M+ people worldwide.
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, growth, business, and
cities. I am now 28 years old.
Ex-founder obsessed about product and the future of agents. I love investing. I love my city. I love playing acoustic guitar, traveling, watching the Yankees, and enjoying a pint of Guinness with my best friends. Building websites and software is both a profession and a hobby of mine; this website is a great example.
My Work
It's simple: I love to build products.
My superpower is the ability to always see a product for the first time. This allows me to ship things that are intuitive and simple to use, while pushing my teammates to do the same. I don't believe complexity is a good thing.
I thrive at the intersection of product, agent-first development, and growth engineering. I've led features like Data Sources that enables Knock to ingest events from anywhere. That feature was one of our fastest growing features ever at the company. Within a few weeks we were ingesting tens of millions of events without a hitch. Stats like those make me happy: I love building features and pushing ideas that move the business forward
Before Knock, I've built dozens of products and have ran a few startups. That experience, plus years of building software products from scratch, has given me a unique sense for what drives adoption and value in early-stage environments.
I love high-trust teams where we can ship fast, speak our minds, and own big outcomes. High autonomy is my M.O. If you're curious, go ahead and check out my timeline of work.
About This Website
This website has been my internet home since 2023. This is the place 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 includes my writing, favorite links, contacts—and with the connection of a Google Cloud bucket—images, videos and files too.
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. Simple. It works great.
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.
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.