Betwixt Code and Music

Written by Mike Mathew who lives and works in Dallas building useful things. Sometimes he posts on Mastodon. Mike also wears many hats at Presto Assistant where he is a co-founder, owner, and product engineer.

Isaac graduates high school

TLDR; Our oldest child Isaac graduated from Berkner High School in Richardson ISD, and we are super proud of him! And now, a tale of how my…

2020: Year in review

I am historically not great at looking back at what happened in the past. Entries like this one in the record of the World Wide Web are my…

Fitness Retrospective 2020

A few years back I stopped making resolutions at the start of the new year. It seems a bit arbitrary to make goals due to the calendar…

Some Words Add Little Value

As I traverse the roads of cyberspace I often see many articles, posts, and various other writings, as we all do. Sometimes the writing…

Use a Pull Request Template in GitHub

GitHub templates are all the rage! If you are working on a team of > 1 and want to maintain a consistent approach to pull requests (a.k.a…

Decade in Review: 2010s

My friend Mike Garcia (of L.V.Berkner High School/Texas Christian University/Phantom Regiment fame) recently shared his reflections on the…

A Journey Through Leadership

Recently my uncle Tommy passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer. It makes one think on life and our purpose when a close family…

Musings for September 27, 2019

My “musings” contain items I am thinking/learning/considering during the week. Enjoy! I made a better effort to read more real books this…

Musings for September 20, 2019

As a person in our filled-to-the-brim-with-technology world, I sometimes need to slow down. Getting words on a page/screen can be that…

Reboot

For about two years, I have come back to my blog with the intent to update the layout or underlying structure in some major way. I usually…

Internet Archive to the Rescue

Sometimes one finds oneself in a position where one needs to rebuild an old website. What can one do in this situation? Mayhap the website…

Apple Battery PR Dilemma

Recently Apple, Inc. has been in the headlines due to an on-purpose software modification. This highly-publicized battery story limits the…

Uglify Might Get Ya

I still code almost every day. My GitHub commits don’t tell the whole story, but I have taken very few days off this year. Most of my work…

Getting to Teach

I used to teach music full-time. It was my identity and provided a way for my skills and personality to be useful to others. Teaching music…

In Memoriam: Mark Mathew

My bride Melissa and I arrived in California today. We flew into Orange County’s John Wayne International Airport. After getting our nifty…

Browsing the Internet

How do you consume internet websites these days? Is it through a web browser or possibly a native app? A literal ton of people are only…

Little Helper Apps

My wife was recently telling me that she likes using the “little thingy” to change the size of the app running on her laptop. After a short…

Texas State Marching Contest 2016

Some random thoughts while watching the live cast of the 2016 Texas State Marching Contest. I surely will not be commenting on each of the…

Out of Practice

I have noticed a funny thing as of late. In music-making and writing I am out of practice. This is a cautionary tale of awareness and a…

Staying Sane with a Long Commute

or Podcasts! Before I get too far in, please understand how Dallas works. Everyone drives because we mostly live outside of the city proper…

On the Job

or Happy Three Months! I have now worked at CEA for longer than I was in code school last fall. Today is exactly 3 months from my first day…

Landing the Gig

or The Big Payoff This stuff works! I am now a software engineer and have a job that I love. Let me walk you through my basic timeline and…

Filling Each Day

or Purposefully Making Each Day Count This week, as I entered week 5 after my The Iron Yard studies, I knew that I would need an extra…

Staying Connected

or Self-encouragement TL;DR - smile at other people and talk to yourself. A friend of mine recently nailed it. I would love to work in a…

The Weeks After Code School

or How to stay focused Since returning to my home near Dallas, I have been working hard to stay busy. This is fairly easy to do with four…

The Iron Yard in Review

or What I learned about me As I sit and reflect over the last few months of my time at The Iron Yard-Austin, I can make some good…

Final Push

or Finishing the Marathon Our cohort at The Iron Yard-Austin started in late August on the same day that all public schools in Texas have…

Approaching Destination

or Catching Up I now find myself in week 11 out of 12 in my studies at The Iron Yard-Austin. Much has happened recently, so what follows is…

On Group Work

or Avoiding Merge Conflicts in Version Control Week 8 at The Iron Yard found our Front-End Engineering class heading into a group project…

Relearning Problem Solving

or Remembering how to learn Let’s go to inspect element and see what that is. What is the type of that variable? And what type is the data…

Parse for the Back End

Authentication for Beginners (Sadly, Parse was acquired by Facebook and shut down their services in February 2017. The link to my exquisite…

Finding Music Again

Shaking off the burnt toast I got burned out. Being involved with something and thinking about it nearly all the time for over 20 years will…

An Important Question

A former student asks an important question During this career-transition for me, I have aimed at sharing some of my insights and findings…

Hackathon Retrospective

Real-world kinda stuff right here Our introduction to working in teams was rooted in Agile. On Wednesday, our guest speaker to introduce our…

Backbone Basics

Backbone makes it easier Our front end engineering class has brought us to the point where we know enough book information to make a…

Building an Image Gallery

Building a gallery for images posted from users We have spent the week learning how to simplify JavaScript down into jQuery (although, that…

Meetup Notes - Designing a Web App

Design Meetup @ The Iron Yard-Austin I learned some Photoshop tonight! Abby Larner led the meetup attendees through a small “pet” project. I…

The Iron Yard - Day 15

This is it…don’t get scared now… We have driven deeper into this world of JavaScript and jQuery. Today we talked about review from last…

The Iron Yard - Day 13

JS + HTML = 😎 Our homework over the weekend was to construct a to-do list using vanilla JavaScript i.e. just plain ol’ JavaScript with no…

What Is This?

JS Keyword “this” Ok, things are about to get confusing. If you are not thinking clearly then go skip this and go read the facebooks or…

The Iron Yard - Week 3

Week 3 and Other Tidbits In my quest to switch careers, a coding bootcamp seemed like a good fit. Through a mutual friend, I talked to a…

The Iron Yard - Day 08

Tic-Tac-Toe In our quest to learn about loops of all kinds, the task at hand is to create a game of tic-tac-toe (also, called ”Noughts and…

The Iron Yard - Day 07

The Matrix We have learned about arrays and objects. We are now aware of the matrix. falling-integers-on-a-shell-screen Arrays - overview An…

The Iron Yard - Day 06

Digging Deeper On Tuesday we dove a little deeper into JavaScript discussing boolean operators, the ternary operator, and conditional…

The Iron Yard - Day 05

JavaScript Solidly into week 2 now and things got real. Our JavaScript assignment was pretty straightforward, and I had no issue getting…

The Iron Yard - Week 1 Review

Week 1 is finished! We made it through! We have sixteen Front-Enders in our class, and we have covered a lot of ground during the first week…

The Iron Yard - Week 1 Friday

SASS part 2 Something learned very early in development or programming is the beautiful phrase “Don’t Repeat Yourself” - usually referred to…

The Iron Yard - Day 04

Sass sassy-sunglasses (image courtesy of sass-lang.com) Whoa, baby, this stuff is cool. Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets or, SASS, makes…

The Iron Yard - Day 03

Today we had engaging lecture and examples over the specificity of CSS selectors. I definitely do not fully have it down, but it is…

The Iron Yard - Day 02

Day 02 of The Iron Yard has happened. I lived through it. After learning several tidbits about CSS tricks and how to use floats and overflow…

The Iron Yard - Day 01

Day 01 of coding bootcamp is in the books. We have seventeen people in our class ranging from “checking this out” to seasoned developers…

DCI 2015 Aftermath

After another thrilling season of drum & bugle corps, everyone is slowly making the return trip home. Young ladies and gentlemen across the…

Open Source Teaching

As a teacher of many long years, I really never felt like I was in it by myself. When I would ask for help, then people would generally make…

Switching Gears

Well, I am leaving the formal teaching profession to do something completely different. When all of my kiddos and so many friends across the…

And In This Corner...

I am Mike Mathew, and you have stumbled into my corner of the interwebs. Welcome! In the case that you don’t know me, please go find my…