I’ve been in and out of Toastmasters for several years now, and I have done my Icebreaker speech multiple times now. The Icebreaker speech is the first speech that you do at Toastmasters and is meant as an introduction to the club. The speech is a 4-6 minute speech and the overall goal is to basically survive. By surviving the Icebreaker speech, you’re supposed to learn that it’s ok to be nervous, but public speaking isn’t going to kill you. Just as with that Icebreaker speech, I’ve written this post, my first post, for my blog multiple times over the years. I’ve written for a while, then stopped, then restarted with a new website, etc. Once again, as I launch this latest (and hopefully final) incarnation of my blog, this will be my last Icebreaker post.

Welcome to my website and blog! My name is Michael Collins. Professionally, I use my semi-full name, Michael F. Collins, III. The “F” stands for Francis. I think I am a fifth generation Irish-American, and I may technically be the fifth instead of the third, but legally, I use the third for my suffix. What I think happened was that back in the day, commoners didn’t really use suffixes. Then in my grandfather’s era, it was common to refer to the father as Senior and the son as Junior, and that kind of stuck. Then when I was born, I became III. And when my son was born, he became IV, or cuatro, as I like to call him.

I am originally from Los Angeles, California, United States of America, in the Eagle Rock neighborhood. I grew up in Northern California in San Ramon and later Dixon. After graduating high school, I attended California State University, Sacramento to study Computer Engineering. After leaving college, I relocated back to the Bay Area and settled back in San Ramon. I worked in the Bay Area through the .com bubble. After that period, I relocated for a job to Scottsdale, Arizona, before settling in Surprise, Arizona, where I currently live and am raising my family.

I got my first computer, a Tandy 1000 when I was in fifth grade, and I was just drawn to it. I wanted to learn so much about it. I started to learn how to program in BASIC using computer programs that were published in the back of MAD Magazine at the time. From there, I asked my mother for computer programming books and just couldn’t get enough. I went from BASIC to learn Intel Assembly Language, then I moved on to Pascal using Turbo Pascal, and then C and eventually C++. I also learned and experimented with other programming languages such as Logo and Prolog.

I was a self-taught programmer and software developer. My school did not have any computer science classes. I learned mostly from reading and learning from other adults in my local community that shared their knowledge with me at the time. In my senior year of high school, I took and passed the Advanced Placement exam in Computer Science and earned college credit.

I obtained my first professional job as a programmer in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Sacramento State. A local company was advertising for a programming job in the college newspaper and I applied for it. I dressed up in slacks, white shirt, and a tie and I personally delivered my resume to the office, which was close to the school campus. After a few interviews and a reference from my computer science professor, I got the job. I desperately needed the job, as I had no money and was struggling to find a place to live after moving out of the dorms at Sacramento State. But I stayed in that job and grew for almost three years until the company was acquired and move back to Philadelphia. I could have relocated back to Philadelphia with the rest of the company, but I wasn’t ready to leave California, and fortunately, the time was right and there were a lot of doors open for me in the Bay Area with my experience.

I grew a lot technically during my years in the Bay Area. I picked up Java in 1996 when it first came out, and that powered a lot of my early career. As web browsers became more mainstream, I also began learning JavaScript. I learned COBOL when I started working for PeopleSoft in 1998, as they insisted that we use it for the first version of the Enterprise Performance Management product that I helped to build. We eventually switched to C++ for the second version of the product. My next job was with a startup in San Francisco where I finally got to use Java while working on demand chain optimization software.

In 2001, I began learning C# and the .NET Framework from Microsoft. This platform dominated my life for the next 24 years and counting. Along the way, I started working more with Linux than Microsoft Windows and I started exploring other languages that were more common in the Linux space such as Python, Perl, and Ruby. A former colleage at my current company also introduced me to Erlang and OTP as he had used it previously in his career in the telecommunication space. My interest in Erlang eventally led me to learning Elixir, which I totally love!

In the modern microservice era, I have come to love programming in Go and tend to use it a lot for personal projects. I hope to find more professional opportunities to use it in the near future. I’ve also started learning Rust for use in certain microservices and other programs that I am writing, although I’m still struggling through my learning curve with its syntax and how it works. I do like it the more I work with it though. Next up is probably Zig as I’ve been hearing about it recently.

Along with my other programming endeavors, I made the leap into mobile application development with the Apple iPhone 4. I began by learning Objective-C and then made the switch to Swift in the modern era. I’ve also expanded into the Android ecosystem and learned to build Android applications using Java and Kotlin. For my work with Neudesic, I learned to build mobile applications using Flutter and Dart, React Native, and Xamarin/MAUI. My preference when developing mobile applications is to use the native development languages and tools though. I just enjoy them more and feel like my applications turn out better.

As of the time of this writing, I am currently working for Neudesic. Neudesic was acquired by IBM in February, 2022, and we’ve operated under their ownership for slightly over three years now. I originally joined Neudesic on May 19, 2008, almost 17 years ago. I have grown tremendously thanks to numerous opportunities that I have found and have achieved the position of Senior Director of Application Innovation for Neudesic’s Desert market (Phoenix and Las Vegas, primarily). I have a very interesting role in that I manage a business unit with revenue and profit expectations, manage a very large team, and still contribute to customer projects when I can, which isn’t as much as I would like. But the role and my time at Neudesic has been very rewarding. I have achieved a lot. I helped to build up Neudesic’s mobile development capabilities and we have been very successful with many customer projects being released to the Apple and Google stores. I have helped to diversify our technologies beyond the Microsoft ecosystem, and we’re very current now as Microsoft itself has adopted the additional languages that we are using such as Python, Java, JavaScript, and Go.

My goal is to maintain a professional and technical focus on this website and blog. This website and the blog are intended to be a place where I can share what I am working on and express my ideas in a technical space. I also love cooking and will post recipes I’ve learned or am experimenting with from time to time, but mostly I’ll focus on computer science, software engineering, and electronics topics. I love to learn and I want to share what I am learning with you, both the good and the bad. I will not use this space to push my political positions or opinions. I’ll save that for Facebook 😄.

My intention is to keep this website and blog going. I personally need the outlet to write. I don’t seek fame or fortune. I just want to share my ideas with others. Writing down my ideas and what I have learned also helps me personally, as it’s good to kind of review and rehash my ideas as I’m writing them to make sure I’m thinking clearly. I am sharing information on my blog because I love to share, to teach others, and to learn through feedback from others. As you’re reading my future posts, I encourage you to provide comments, feedback, ideas for improvement, and constructive criticism.

At the time of publishing this article, my website is a work in progess, and most likely will be a work in progress for a while to come. Instead of waiting for the perfect website, I’m publishing stuff as I go, and I’m making small improvements over time to make my website look good. I’m using my website for a bit of learning and modernizing my skills with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They have changed a lot over the years and are much more capable now, and I’m trying to keep up to date with the latest advancements, especially around CSS. So I apologize if my website doesn’t look perfect now, but I’m going to get there to make it better. One of my biggest professional beliefs is that shipping the first version of anything is incredibly hard. But once you get it out there, it’s much easier to publish updates and changes. So I’m taking that belief with me to this website. I have content to share, the website’s not perfect, but it will render in a web browser, and once it’s up, I can make it look better over time, which I will.

Welcome to my website! I hope that over time you keep coming back and find value in the content that I am publishing. Please feel free to provide feedback either in post comments, or also feel free to email me or contact me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, or GitHub.