About

I'm Michael, and I'm a technologist and maker that's interested in building things that help make the world a better place for people.

I work as a Planetary Computing Fellow at the University of Cambridge, part of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, where I work closely with plant scientists and zoologists, both from the University and conservation NGOs, building pipelines and tooling to enable us to better understand and find solutions for the climate crisis. You can see an example of that work, looking a biodiversity impacts, here. My focus is not just building faster pipelines through the application of computer systems knowledge, but also make the pipelines easier to share, reproduce, and scrutinise.

Before this I've had the fortune to work in many different interesting sectors of technology, all focusing on how build things that leave the world a better place for people. I've worked in computer security, founding and running the Mac product team at Bromium (now part of HP Inc) for four years, and running its software manageability team for a while too. I worked at Ndiyo, trying to use a new type of thin-client device to provide Internet and computing access to more people around the world (before phones made that avenue redundant!), and I built one of the first cloud based digital signage solutions (still in production today as part of Numed's Envisage system) using that same tech as a way to help fund the not-for-profit side. I was also a researcher at Intel Research, working on optical networking.

I also run my own software consultancy, called Digital Flapjack (never get your domain name when you're hungry...) and over the years I've had the pleasure of working on some great projects with a very diverse set of clients: from mobile based cultural projects that ran at the Edinburgh Festival and games for Tate Modern, all the way through to advanced healthcare startups, and hardware design, and pretty much everywhere between.

I also design and build custom electric guitars using a mix of traditional handcrafting and cutting-edge modern digital fabrciation techniques like 3D printing and generative design, which you can read more about here.

I speak English natively, and Swedish as a second language.

Colophon

This website is built using Webplats, my own publishing framework built in OCaml. The code for this specific site is here. The code is available under the European Union Public License.

The fonts used are Linux Libertine and Biolinum, which are available under both the GPL and OFL.