About — cunningorb

I was always the guy who set up the LAN party. Myst in the dark with my brother, two computers strung together with a COM cable so we could play Star Trek Armada, Halo tournaments for my friends.

That last one didn't go too well.

It took me until my early 20s to notice that any of it was a skill. People started paying me to fix their computers and I thought it was strange that anyone would pay for something that easy and fun. These days I'm a senior full stack engineer in Oxford, Michigan, which mostly means the puzzles got bigger and somebody else brings the snacks.

I got into engineering sideways. I spent two years at Rocket Mortgage as a business analyst, turning complicated mortgage workflows into requirements somebody could actually build, before I moved onto the engineering side. I've never once regretted the detour. Knowing why a business wants the thing makes you a lot harder to argue with when you tell them how it ought to be built.

Since then the work has looked like this. React dashboards sitting on ASP.NET Core APIs for Volkswagen of America, serving thousands of authenticated users. An OpenAI normalization pipeline that got messy vehicle lead data to 90% accuracy across millions of records. A centralized Holiday Calendar API that I had to document and talk several engineering teams into adopting, which was the harder half of that job. Blue/green deployments across regions that held 100% uptime on services nobody could afford to have go down.

Lately it's a Shopify app carrying more than 50,000 fitment records, a Laravel platform that reads a merchant's public storefront and tells them what's wrong with their returns process, and an Azure integration for an SEC-regulated financial firm, where "mostly works" is not a category anyone accepts.

Is any of that glamorous? Not really. The parts I like best are the awkward ones. The deployment that fails for a reason nobody has written down, the data that refuses to normalize no matter how politely you ask, the legacy SQL that runs fine right up until the day you need to write a test for it. I like puzzles, and I like handing the solved puzzle to somebody who needed it. That hasn't really changed since the COM cable.

I've also been a youth leader at my church since 2021, which has taught me more about explaining technical things clearly than any job has. Middle schoolers tell you immediately when you aren't making sense. Adults just nod.

Elsewhere

Around the site

Work has the projects worth showing. Programming and Writing hold the longer pieces, including the time an async flag set to "off" cost my brother and me several months on a game we thought would take a few weeks. Volunteering covers the teaching side.

If you're hiring, or you've got something awkward that needs building, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. My name is Micah. Nice to meet you!