Howdy! I’m Michael D. Mathew

But most people call me Mike. I’m a developer/designer & musician based out of the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I like to make pretty things that help people. Since December 2015 I have worked as a software engineer at Text-Em-All in Frisco, TX (formerly named Call-Em-All). I also help organize the ReactJS Dallas software meetup. My software development career kicked off at the (former) code school in Austin, Texas called The Iron Yard. I occasionally help mentor young coding ninjas at the Frisco Coder Dojo.

In late 2018 I co-founded Presto Assistant, a service to help fine arts teachers organize their logistics and office. This app makes the lives of fine arts teachers better by helping them get and stay organized. It's been a lot of fun to build a product that helps teachers have a better day!

As a longtime musician and music educator I worked with some terrific programs as a performer and teacher. The list is long but includes such powerhouses as Texas A&M University-Commerce, Berkner High School, North Mesquite High School, Trinity High School, Flower Mound High School, Texas Christian University, University of Texas at Arlington, and several others all over the state of Texas. On occasion I can be seen hitting drums or marimbas or timpani and sometimes even get to write music for other people and groups. Thankfully, I do get to play drums at church every weekend, so my funky beats continue to thrive.

My most important work: husband to my lovely wife, father to my three wonderful children, and big brother to many half-siblings. I enjoy any good music, Apple computers and products, and the Oxford comma. By night I stay up learning everything that I don't yet know, or I'm reading about how I should be sleeping more. My family and friends are awesome and a continual blessing in my life.

Find Me

I post on Mastadon as @drumsensei and also on Twitter as @drumsensei (though less often these day). I spend a good bit of time in the open-source awesomeness of GitHub, too.

Colophon

Uses - links to many of the things I use

This site is built with GatsbyJS which means most content was written using Markdown and ReactJS. The original incarnation of the site was a RapidWeaver project. After a brief rewrite in Jekyll, we ended up here! Hosting by Netlify. Coding is done in Visual Studio Code (with generous assistance from the dev tools). I use a 2021 16" M1 MacBook Pro — it's the best machine I've ever used. As a constant learner, I will likely be poking and prodding here and there throughout this space, so it might not always look the same. Also, there is little guarantee that it will appear correctly on older browsers, so keep them up to date!

Why Drumsensei?

When I taught at Trinity High School in Euless, TX, I referred to the performers in the cymbal line as the "cymbal ninjas". They were an all-female, extremely intelligent, no-nonsense group of people. All of the extraordinary moves and sounds they made were superbly choreographed, and they did not put up with any halfway effort. After some interval of time, all of the students began to call me "sensei." So, drumsensei seems appropriate.