I’m a writer, developer, toy and game designer, and amateur stuntman. For most of my career I tried to keep those columns separate because professional convention said I should. I’ve mostly stopped doing that. The combination is the actual job, and pretending otherwise just made the work harder to find a home for.
The shape of it, roughly: 47 technical books published between 1996 and 2010, mostly with Sams, O’Reilly, Wiley, and Microsoft Press. JavaScript, Java, HTML, Ajax, mobile development, game programming, and whatever else the publishers were buying that year. Translated into a dozen-plus languages I can’t read, which pushes the total edition count past 80. A few trade-press articles for CIO, Game Developer magazine, and Head First Labs. Four video courses for O’Reilly when the iPhone was still figuring out what kind of device it was going to be, plus dozens of online courses for DigitalThink when corporate e-learning was the new thing. A handful of mobile games and Java applets that won’t run in any browser made in the last decade — including the first action game ever written for Microsoft Windows, back when GUIs themselves were the new thing. They all live in the Vault now, where the trail keeps the receipts.
After the book era I shifted into freelance software development and have been doing that ever since. iOS apps for CNN, USA Today, Fox News, Xfinity (which won a 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development), Xerox, The Criterion Collection, and others. Less visible than the books — most of those apps shipped under client brands — but it’s the work that’s actually paid the bills for the last fifteen years, and it’s where most of the engineering judgment I write about now actually got formed.
Stalefish Labs is the home for the entertainment projects that are mine. The company launched in 2002; the first game, a physical card game called Tall Tales, shipped the following year. The company name comes from a skateboard air where you grab the heel edge of the board behind your trailing leg, mid-rotation. Still one of my favorite tricks. Still pulling it off, mostly. The first time the connection between skating and the computer-book-author version of me got articulated in writing was in a 2008 blog post about an underappreciated yo-yo virtuoso — six years after the company already existed, but the first time I’d explained the why of the name in any kind of public form.
The current things, in no particular order: I still skate. I sit on the board of The Skatepark Project. I’ve kept bees on and off. I build ramps. I jump mountain bikes. I race RC cars. I write mobile apps, create physical games, and have been collaborating with AI to wade into creative writing. And I’m publishing the essays I’ve been thinking about for a long time but kept telling myself nobody would read. Turns out that was just the internal judge talking; the actual readers seem fine with it.
On the skating specifically: briefly sponsored as a vert skater in the early 90s before the industry collapsed. Engineering school and other work for the next decade-plus, then back to amateur skating and a few regional contest wins. A friend at a contest joked I looked like an accountant who showed up to destroy. The name stuck as an in-joke among friends — that’s @tndestroyer on Instagram, where I post nothing but skating and mountain biking, which suits the handle’s spirit.
If you came here for the writing on AI and how it’s changing creative work, that lives in Essays. If you want the technical bibliography with covers, sample chapters, and code downloads, that’s in Works. If you want to wander through 18 years of things I made that didn’t fit any single column, Vault is the door.
I’m reachable at howdy@michaelmorrison.com. I read everything. I reply to most of it.