My Ice Breaker

I’m nothing if not persistent. I have rewritten this same article so many times that I have lost count. But here I am starting yet another incarnation of my blog and personal website and writing the article once again. When I die, my eulogy will probably be titled “My Ice Breaker” to introduce myself to those in any afterlife, if there is one. So, once again, welcome!

My name is Michael Collins and you have found yourself to my personal website and blog. I am a professional software developer, architect, and engineer. I have been programming and creating applications for 41 years and 32 years professionally. I pre-date the Internet and now I’ll be remembered as a pre-AI developer.

I am a polyglot programmer, meaning that I can read/write/use multiple programming languages. My first programming language was Pascal, followed by BASIC (I paved my own path) on the MS-DOS operating system. I then learned Intel Assembly Language, followed by C and C++. My first professional job used Pascal, but then I started introducing C++ into it later in my time there. I wrote C++ programs on Microsoft Windows for several years before joining PeopleSoft where I built my first COBOL application. After PeopleSoft, I made the transition to Java and enjoyed working for several startups during the first dot-com boom. In 2001, I came back to the Microsoft ecosystem with C# and .NET and exclusively worked in that ecosystem until 2017, although I did begin to explore Erlang and Elixir too. After 2017, my use of different languages has exploded with Node.js, Python, Go, and Rust.

I have had several websites over the years that failed for one reason or another. In some cases, I got too busy. In others, I was building the website myself and just kind of ran out of time and inspiration to get it just right. I’ll be honest in that I have spent a lot of my career away from the front-end, so UX and graphic design have not been my strong points, but I have been working on that and learning web design and CSS over the past couple of years. But this website marks a big difference for me.

My new website is about 98% AI-generated. I started off in Figma and used Figma Make to create the initial design of the website. I then created an empty Astro website in my Git repository and used GitHub Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4.6 and the Figma MCP Server to import my website design and create the Astro templates. From there, I did a few little modifications by hand, and I’m now up and running with a working website in a few days. It has been quite the fun experience to figure this out and see these programs working together.

Why should you follow along on my website? I’ve always tried to mentor others and share my experiences. I’ve been a frequent past presenter at local user groups and Desert Code Camp here in Phoenix, Arizona. Right now, I feel very compelled to share my knowledge and experience, especially in this current environment of innovation and growth around AI technologies. My current professional role has me focusing on building AI agents and integrations via MCP servers, and staying on the edge of developments in the AI space, so I intend to spend a lot of time blogging about this and sharing my self-education and growth with all of you.

I am also working diligently on my own custom applications again for the first time in a while. I want to develop them in the open so that you can see my approach to building products and the decisions that I will make along the way. I want to share the excitement as I implement new features and show you how I do it. Maybe it will help you out at some point in the future, but more importantly, you’ll see how I think and how I continuously learn as a software developer.

Besides software development, my main hobby is cooking. You will notice that my website has a tab for recipes, although there’s no content yet. I intend to share some of my favorite recipes with you and if you are interested in cooking or have wanted to get better at cooking, I encourage you to try some of these recipes yourself and share them with your family.

Along with my website and blog, I am hoping in the near future to expand into the world of online videos with my own YouTube channel. I will be recording mostly programming videos and sharing those with you. I will be demonstrating my software development techniques to solve problems and build programs, and I hope that you find those valuable.

Welcome to my website! Please come back and see what new things I am building! Also, please feel free to reach out and connect with me either through email, LinkedIn, or other social media services. I love the interaction and receiving constructive feedback or ideas from others.