perlkour is a blag, generally technology oriented but not necessarily. For now it’s a place for me to write about gadgets and other cool nerd stuff, and also rant about things that don’t make sense. With my network of friends and associates in the industry, I hope to someday open it up to guest contributors.
No ads, no affiliate links (unless explicitly noted). I’m just doing this for fun.
What does “perlkour” mean?
perlkour is a portmanteau of Perl, the programming language, and parkour, the extreme sport featured in Casino Royale and elsewhere. I coined the term during a brief chat conversation with a friend about hardcore Perl programming. Of course, this blag isn’t strictly about Perl, but there will definitely be a Perl flavor.
Who are you?
Here’s my OFFICIAL BLURB:
Mike is an avid technologist who has been building systems and writing software since the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. After a ten-year stint as Discover Financial’s resident data integration guru, he returned to his internet roots, leading the development of a “proptech” web service and iOS app in 2014 and a digital brand engagement platform and web app in 2015-6. His current project is a next-generation ecommerce platform. Mike lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
I’m the chief architect, director of engineering, and resident IT person at a small business called Products On White Photography. These days, I work primarily in Ruby (off Rails) and JavaScript. I’m a Sinatra contributor, and I created the Sinja “framework” to make writing backends for EmberJS web applications super easy. I’m big into Linux, web scale, ZFS, homelabbing, and lots of other fun stuff. I run this blag on my own WordPress stack.
My wife and I are both vocalists. I mostly perform jazz standards—although I’m on a bit of an indefinite hiatus—and describe my voice as a vibrant bass-baritone.