Hi Ali. I’m Michael. I build products, and take care of them.
I enjoy building software that makes people’s working lives easier. At LBA, I’d put that into practice by helping coaches spend less time on admin and more time helping students build their businesses.
Senior Engineering Manager, Laravel Cloud December 2025–present
Helping the infrastructure platform scale.
At Laravel, I lead engineering for Laravel Cloud’s infrastructure platform while continuing to support Core Services across the ecosystem. My focus is making those services reliable, easier to maintain and better for developers to use.
I help teams turn priorities into working software through strong testing, practical mentoring and reliable releases. Alongside that, I contribute code through an agentic workflow I’ve developed and refined both independently and with colleagues at Laravel.
SwingU
Former CTO, VP and Senior Engineer 2018–2025 · 8 years
Product ownership at consumer scale.
Across 8 years at SwingU, including 4 years as CTO, I built software and led engineering across web and mobile. I helped the platform reach 7M+ users and led engineering through Golf Genius’s 2024 acquisition and the transition afterwards.
Web & native mobile
Engineering experience at SwingU
Working across the whole product.
At SwingU, I worked across .NET and C# on Windows Server, Laravel and Go on Ubuntu, and AWS infrastructure, alongside Swift and Kotlin mobile products. I built our first-party API and integrations and helped coordinate delivery across web and mobile.
03 / My agentic workflow
How I build with AI.
I use a “chief of staff” agent to clarify the problem and scope. Specialist agents then review architecture, security, design and technical leadership decisions before implementation begins.
As an AI-native engineer, I use Claude and ChatGPT every day to work through ideas and direct implementation. I’m experimenting with Grokbot and have tried SoloTerm to coordinate collaboration across multiple agents and models.
01
Get the problem clear
I talk through what matters, what’s unclear and what we need to build. The agent helps turn that into requirements and a scope, with planning kept proportionate to the task.
02
Challenge the plan
Specialist agents challenge each other’s assumptions and work out the order of implementation. That helps me catch gaps before code is written.
03
Build in reviewable pieces
Agents work through the plan in small pull requests. I review and test the code and decide what gets committed.
Voice has changed how I work.
I estimate that dictating to my agents has made delivery at least four times faster than my previous keyboard-based interaction with them. It also lets me work through ideas on mobile and tablet.
Personal estimate, rather than a controlled benchmark.
04 / A starting idea for LBA
Give a coach a better starting point.
I’d start by watching how a coach prepares for one student conversation. Then I’d build a small, useful brief around that real workflow.
A proposed experiment, to shape with your team.
COACH PREPARATION BRIEFConcept
01
Start with the evidence
Bring goals, agreed actions, and relevant notes into one view, with a source and update time for each item.
02
Make uncertainty visible
Link AI summaries back to the source. Make stale or missing context obvious and let the coach correct the brief.
03
Find out if it helps
Test the brief with a small group of coaches. Measure preparation time and corrections, then use their feedback to decide what to improve.
The coach keeps the judgment. The software makes the context easier to find.
05 / Technical foundation
A practical foundation. Room to keep learning.
I’ve worked with TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js and Node.js, alongside PHP / Laravel, Vue / Inertia, Go and C# / .NET. My experience also covers SQL and Postgres, AWS, Docker, monitoring, APIs and integrations, plus Swift and Kotlin mobile products.
I have a basic grounding in Python and some practical experience, which I’m keen to build on. Supabase would be new to me; I’ve used Postgres and PlanetScale.