Mike's Software Development Blog

Retrospective 2002: Performance Engineering at Sun Microsystems

Tue, 19 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A retrospective on my work as a performance engineer at Sun Microsystems — two Supercomputing 2002 papers I gathered data for, the NUMA-and-MPI hardware landscape of the era, the UltraSPARC processors measured against the 6502 of my childhood and the CPUs of today, why the CISC-versus-RISC mental model is long past its expiration date, Tanenbaum’s register-less stack machine, and how a memcpy change shipped in Solaris.

Retrospective 2019: Coding Interviews

Sat, 16 May 2026 12:00:00 -0400

A retrospective on practicing for software engineering coding interviews in 2019 — a little history, some opinions on remote work and prep materials, and a tour of every puzzle in my Cracking-the-Coding-Interview-in-Java repository.

Retrospective 2013: Software Built to Run a Particle Accelerator

Fri, 08 May 2026 20:35:00 -0400

A retrospective on building control software for Jefferson Lab’s 12 GeV CEBAF particle accelerator — the design of the Insertables System, debugging hardware by listening for actuator sounds at the beamline, and missing the ICALEPCS conference due to the federal government shutdown.

Building Cosmic Blob with Claude

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used Claude Code to recreate Cosmic Glob — a two-player arcade game I used to type in by hand from a magazine on my Atari 130XE — as a browser-based canvas game called Cosmic Blob.

Welcome To My Tech Journey

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An introduction to the blog and its author — a software engineer with thirty years of experience across Jefferson Lab, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and GEICO, writing about programming languages, cryptography, general computing, and computer architecture.

Readme

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 15:43:32 -0500

Senior Software Engineer based in Williamsburg, VA. Three decades of building systems that run at the edges of what hardware can do — particle accelerator controls at Jefferson Lab, cryptographic infrastructure at AWS, and PKI services at GEICO. My technical depth lives in Go, Rust, Java, and C++, with a particular love for cryptography, high-performance computing, and the low-level internals in the CPU.

I believe science and expertise matter — not just in engineering, but in public life. Rigorous training, evidence-based reasoning, and respect for hard-won knowledge are values I try to bring to my work and to the people I mentor.