Designer
I consider Mike both a technical and creative genius (in the truest meaning of the word). We've worked together on a number of web and design projects over the past 5 years, and in that time I have been blown away with the efficient, elegant, and constructive solutions he has come up with for each assignment. He consistently delivers ideas that simplify, beautify, and improve the user's experience.
I worked alongside Mike for 6+ years at Pangea Foundation and during that time found myself emulating his skills in UX design and client management. His diligent work ethic consistently brought out the best in his coworkers and often uncovered customers' demands and design needs before they even knew them. His product designs featured a strong focus on logic and cognitive process and were streamlined, clean, and intuitive—a must for our mostly non-technical customers. He has a knack for making things simple, but still aesthetically pleasing. During my extended tenure, I never came across a customer who was unsatisfied with the end result of one of his designs. He is one of those rare gems who can straddle the worlds of both tech and design and will be an asset to any team he joins.
Mike’s inherently a technical leader. His technical skills include server administration, UI/UX design, IIS, SQL, .NET, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, and CSS. His design and interface style was implemented on literally every facet of our applications and our clients routinely remarked about how easy the systems that he designed were to learn and use.
I worked with Michael to quickly and efficiently build a disaster response tool to deal with a massive influx of calls to our 211 call center due to a large-scale local disaster. Where our traditional CRM vendor struggled, Michael quickly stepped in and "got it." He developed an extremely easy to use interface, which was critical for success due to the large amount of volunteers walking in our doors that needed to be quickly trained to begin taking live calls.
Working in the capacity of project manager, Mike and I worked very closely on a daily basis working through a prioritized list functionality and ever changing requests. Mike was particularly effective at communicating system limitations and the best method or approach to getting what we needed into a system. He is definitely well versed in the technology employed but also is experienced and tasteful in terms of logical page flows, usability and system/user interaction.
It's rare that IT wizards can work well with social service providers but that's not true with Michael. He can easily manage details of IT systems and translate that complicated language into something understandable to lay people. I have appreciated that he can take my ideas and make them into functional tools of web systems.