I've been building things since I was twelve. Games first, then websites, then the companies and tools around them. This is less a CV and more a house. Have a wander and you'll get the gist of me.

The short version: I'm the kind of developer who'd rather build the thing than buy it. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, the awkward bits in between, I like understanding the whole stack, not just my corner of it.

When I was twelve I was obsessed with RuneScape Classic. Naturally, I decided I'd just make my own. I taught myself a language called DarkBASIC Professional and started building a world.

It was clumsy and ugly and I absolutely adored it. That's the exact feeling I've been chasing ever since: make a world, make it yourself, and see how it ticks.

By thirteen or fourteen I'd moved to C++ with a framework called Dark GDK, churning out silly little strategy-fighting games. The games were unremarkable. What hooked me was underneath them: teaching the enemies to feel alive with A* pathfinding, getting the maths right.

I couldn't stand the big point-and-click engines everyone else used. I wanted to make every piece myself and own the whole thing end to end. I kept building my own engines until I was eighteen, and honestly, I never really stopped.

War Arena, from 2008, was the first game I made that actually worked. It was written in DarkBASIC, like the run of experiments that followed it, most of which did not.

The one I was proudest of wasn't a game at all. It was A* pathfinding, from 2010, and it was my first real taste of how things work underneath.

In 2016 I had 36 hours at a Digital Jersey hackathon to make a game, so I made Alien Escape. It ran on a canvas engine I'd written myself, because of course it did.

It's playable again now, in the Alien Escape article. The high score table is all yours.

At sixteen I started making websites for local shops and bands on the LAMP stack, and getting paid for it. Everyone else reached for WordPress. I wrote my own CMS instead and handed a copy to each client.

I couldn't leave the stack alone between jobs, swapping Apache for Nginx, trying a different database, shaving off whatever I could. Less about the websites, really, and more about finally understanding how every layer fit together.

This is where I work now, writing Go. On the screen is Piko, a little web framework that's really the sum of all the tooling my wife and I kept rebuilding for client after client, folded into one thing.

It ships as a single binary, no build pipeline the size of a small moon. It exists for the same reason all my projects do: I'd rather make the tool than inherit someone else's. It's alpha, and some corners are still sharp, but I use it for real work, which keeps me honest about them.

Explaining something out loud is the cheapest way I know to find the hole in my own understanding, so I record some of it. Practical Kubernetes, Go and building-your-own-tools walkthroughs over on @PolitePixels.

Less 'influencer', more 'engineer thinking out loud with a screen recorder running'.

That's tea in the mug, never coffee, because I hate the stuff. A good day starts before the inbox does: a cup of tea, a quiet hour, and whatever problem I fell asleep thinking about.

The confession: I like the boring parts. Naming things well, deleting code, understanding a system right down to the bottom. Most of my so-called skills are really just that one habit, pointed at different things.

Linux has been my daily driver since I was eighteen, for everything but the gaming. I'm a Fedora person: stable, but bleeding-edge, and quietly responsible for standardising the things the whole industry ends up adopting, like Wayland.

It fits how I think, close to the metal, open by default, no magic you can't go and read for yourself.

Every developer's shelf is really a list of opinions they keep re-reading. Here are mine, abbreviated:

• Build it before you buy it. You only really understand the thing you made.
• Depth beats breadth-on-paper. Know one layer to the bottom and the rest comes easier.
• Simplicity is a feature. Complexity has to earn its place, and most of it can't.
• The boring work is the work. Reliability, naming, deleting code, that's the actual job.

After I left university I went to work at my dad's small computer company. Four and a half years looking after local businesses' IT, servers, backups, the unglamorous Microsoft-shaped plumbing that keeps a company running.

I learned an enormous amount about how real systems are actually held together. I also missed the open-source world the entire time, which, in hindsight, told me everything.

Then I moved to the Netherlands to grow up, professionally. Six years as an infrastructure engineer across enterprise, startups and consultancies, including the core stack behind the Dutch ports, mostly on call.

You learn fast when you're the one the pager wakes at 3am. I learned exactly how systems fall over, and what it costs a team when they do. And the whole time, I was still programming for fun on the side. Building never stopped being the good part.

It was never a straight line. I started a Computer Science degree at Reading and genuinely loved the work. We were writing C and I was having a great time with it. But I was struggling with my mental health at the time, and being away in a loud, party-heavy place got on top of me. I left after a few months.

No regrets. It taught me how I actually work best, and that the learning was never the problem.

I grew up on Jersey, a small island in the Channel, spent six years away in the Netherlands, and then came home. Europe-friendly hours, big skies, the sea about five minutes away.

I do my best thinking a little removed from the noise. Funny that it took moving away to work that out.

The best thing I've built isn't software. I came home, got married, and my wife and I run PolitePixels together, serving clients across the Netherlands, Jersey, Germany and the US.

For our honeymoon we did a loop of America: San Francisco, Vegas, Washington DC, Rhode Island, New York and Jersey City. I will admit to having opinions about the infrastructure of all six.

This is Angelo, my corgi. My name is Michael; his is Angelo, so together we are, inevitably, MichaelAngelo. I didn't plan that. I've simply chosen to believe it was fate.

He's also my reminder that there's a life outside the terminal: short legs, strong opinions, and a non-negotiable schedule of walks. The stubborn bug usually sorts itself out somewhere around lap two of the field.

Yes, it's an elephant. AI is one of my tools, the same as my editor and my compiler. I use it most days, and it doesn't need a ceremony.

The hard part of this job was never making the thing. It's choosing what's worth making, making sure it really helps somebody, and then looking after it for years. That part is still mine, and it's the part I like best.

I take on contract work now and then. It goes through PolitePixels, the small company my wife Esther and I run, but it's me you'd be working with.

I'm happiest on problems where working out what we're really trying to solve is half the job, anywhere in the stack. If that sounds like yours, the postbox is just over there.

I'm always happy to talk infrastructure, Go, building your own tools, or why your deploy takes nine minutes. If you've got an interesting problem, or just want to argue about Linux distros, the postbox is open.