tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) #
I was born in a suburb of Detroit and I am now living in Krakow, Poland. I work as an Elixir Developer for Simplebet. I have family, friends, and a house in the Detroit area so I travel back often.
Current Work #
My full time day job lets me work in Elixir for a company that supplies data to sports books; two things I love! I work with an amazingly supportive team with some of the brightest in the Elixir community. We work mainly in Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView, and Surface. I am starting to get more interested in Compilers and Site Reliability Engineering as well as continuing to master Elixir/Phoenix and its ecosystem.
Previous Work #
My professional career has followed two simultaneous paths. One in technology and the other in business management and leadership and sometimes overlapping.
Professionally I have been lucky enough to develop in C, PHP, Python, and Elixir. These days I play around in Lua, Rust, OCaml, Go, (maybe soon Gleam), and others as well as the technologies supporting the current wave of AI soup.
In the past I have had several leadership roles with titles like CTO, Operations Management, IT Director, Development Manager. I really enjoyed those roles at the “problem solving and strategy” level.
Hobbies and Interests #
Photography #
I am a (very) amateur photographer. I share some of my photos on Instagram (@mkumm) and Flickr.com (@mkumm) and all the photos on this site were taken by me. My main camera is my wonderfully portable Nikon z50. I know it falls in the “non-professional” category of photo hardware, but I am, well a non-professional.
Music Creation #
I played violin through my first year of college and then just stopped. I did nothing with music for about 30 years and then I started playing around with Ableton. I have been experimenting with music composition as I find time, here is a short sample of my latest - One of the Birds
Software Development #
I grew up near the dawn of personal computers. Although I took BASIC classes in high school and Pascal and Fortran in college, I didn’t really start developing at scale until I finally had my own personal computer, around 1995. I am very fortunate now that I get to develop software during work hours and then go deep into compilers (or whatever other topic I am interested in at the time) during my non-work hours. I just don’t get tired of development.
Reading #
I love reading!
Fiction, non-fiction, technical books, whatever. At least 90% of my news comes from reading The Economist.
Craft Beers #
I love tasting craft beers even if my tolerance for drinking is dropping with age. I am not above taking a long trip primarily to taste some new (or old) regional beers.
Coffee #
I love brewing coffee (maybe even more than drinking it) and I always seek out the best local roasters (there are some great ones in Krakow).
Polish Language #
I continue to struggle to learn Polish, but I take weekly lessons and study most days of the week with my Polish-speaking partner.
Cooking #
I really enjoy cooking and end up cooking the vast majority of meals we eat. I will be sharing some of my favorite go-to recipes here.
Travel #
I have been traveling a little less lately. We have some bigger trips planned later this year to some places that I have been meaning to visit but haven’t yet. Most places in Europe are pretty accessible and we sometimes see incredible deals like $25 round trip airfare tickets to Norway!
Chess #
I have just started playing chess again. I don’t win a lot, but I do enjoy the game.
Tools #
The following are my current tools of choice to support my work and hobbies.
Hardware #
- MacBook Pro M1 16-inch (work) My work supplied laptop.
- MacBook Pro M1 16-inch (personal) My dedicated personal laptop.
- MacBook Air M3 13-inch I LOVE the sive, battery and power of this thing. The perfect companion for remote work and travel.
- Philips 27-inch PHL 276E8V A super affordable second display.
- Benq ScreenBar One of the my best purchases. Not only providing spot lighting only where I want it, it also somehow helps reduce my eye strain.
- iPhone 13 ProMax More than 2 years old and still works great for my purposes.
- Nikkon z50 a really great camera body for walking around all day and taking photos. I have 2 lenses, the Nikkor DX 16-50 3.5-6.3 and the Nikkor DX 24/1.7
Development Software #
- Zed - My all day text editor.
- LunarVim - An opinionated and loaded version of NVIM.
- Warp - My terminal of choice at the moment. I am experimenting with it, it feel like it might be trying to do too much though.
- Adobe Products - I know they are expensive, but they have been my graphics/layout workhorse for decades. It takes time to switch. I am trying the Affinity lineup though.
- X-Scope - A great companion for front-end web development
- Postico - My PostgreSQL helper.
- Docker Desktop - A necessary tool these days for development.
- Fantastical - My calendar of choice, and you also get CardHop with your subscription.
- Ableton - I only know about 2% of this application and it is still a blast to create music.
- Rogue Amoeba - All of my other digital sound tools.
- Things - I have been obsessed with task management for decades. Things has really nailed it.