Mike West's brief bio

I’m a web developer. I spend my whole day, practically every day, experimenting with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; dabbling with Python and Ruby; and inhaling a wide variety of potentially useless information through a few hundred RSS feeds. I build websites that delight and inform. I do it well.

I’m curious, and I enjoy work that challenges me to learn something new and stretch in a different direction. I do my best to stay on top of changes in the state of the art so that I can meet challenges with tools well suited to the job at hand. The list of projects I follow on GitHub will give you a good idea of the types of tools I’d prefer to be using, and my Instapaper “Starred” list will give you a glimpse into the reading material I find interesting enough to share.

Professional Bio

At the moment, I’m a developer advocate on Google’s Chrome team in Munich, Germany.

From January 2010 to November 2011, I was part of the team responsible for the web presence of one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany: Sueddeutsche.de. It’s a big site, running on a surprisingly antiquated backend; we work hard to keep things running smoothly, and to meet the high expectations of our users. Generally, we did a pretty good job of it.

Before Sueddeutsche, I worked for Yahoo! on their equally massive European news sites. My team and I took news.yahoo.com’s solid codebase, and made it localizable for distinct markets and languages: we were directly responsible for building and maintaining Yahoo!’s news sites in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, relaunching all five within a year. We laid the foundation for further work that expanded the platform’s scope to include Singapore and beyond. We did good work while understaffed and under pressure, and I’m proud of our accomplishments.

In addition to my in-house work, I’ve written a variety of articles on development for publications such as DigitalWeb, A List Apart, and Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum. I enjoy what I do, and I enjoy sharing tidbits with others.

A more complete resume is available at mikewest.org/resume, with a more socially annotated version at linkedin.com/in/mikewestorg.

If you’re interested in my work, plus me on Google+, follow me on Twitter (@mikewest), fork me on github, or drop an email (mike@mikewest.org.

Personal Bio

A slight clarification of the above: I’m actually a philosophy student cleverly disguised as a successful web developer. Since it was relatively clear early on that it would be slightly more than difficult to make a living sitting under a tree while reading Kant, I’ve focused my energies on the web, which happily has proven itself to be a wonderful decision.

I moved to Germany from Texas a few years back, learned the language, and have settled in Munich for the time being. I think I’ll stick around here for a while…