About

Who am I? What do you want?

Michael Barakat is a designer and front end developer / ux developer / design engineer living and working in Seattle, WA.

Cold hard skills:

name	description	ability
Web developer tools	html, css, node, npm, nvm, webpack, rollup, gulp, mocha, jest, pupateer, storybook, CSS-In-JS, styled components, emotion, jss.	*****
React	Seen it and done it all in this ever evoloving ecosystem.	*****
Angular	Just getting started recently, Dec 2021	*
Typescript	Building single page apps, web components, node applications, and more!	*****
Javascript	These days it just feels wrong to use an untyped language. But hey, sometimes you have to do what you have to do.	*****
Java	Reading text books, learning code. Practicing OOP	**
Python	Wrote a compiler to translate assembly into machine language for Nand to Tetris	**
C	The first typed language I used. Only used for academic learning.	**
Hack Assembly	Assembly language used for Nand to tetris course. I don't ever again want to write another jump statement.	**
Lua	I've coded a couple of simple games in Lua: Breakout, Asteroids, and Pong	**
OOP	I've read a couple of books on the subject of OOP and earned a course certificate in Software Architecture from University of Alberta. I don't consider myself an OOP dev, but am familiar with many patterns not limited to: Command, Factory Method, Strategy, Observer, Singleton, Template Method, Decorator, and more!	***
Design Tools	Layout, Typography, UX Design, Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Zeppelin	*****

But really, how and why did I get here?

When I'm not coding, you'll find me building something in my workshop. Maybe it's a woodworking project, or a pair of shoes, or it could be a photography project too. But why?

It's hard to say sometimes isn't it? Why do I code? Why am I here doing this? The short answer is: I love building things! My whole life for as long as I remember, I have been fascinated by how things work and more especially the act of creation itself: how to create things that are useful, beautiful and enjoyable.

In the late 90's when I was a teenager I started getting into photography. Then later in college I studied film and animation and later worked in the film industry doing some set decoration, set construction, prop handling and then later motion graphics, videography, and video editing. This lead to my initial interest in design.

By 2011 I had moved to Seattle, hoping to land a gig someplace in technology. The unfortunate reality of working as a designer in technology however is, that you don't really get to put your hands into the proverbial "engine of the car." In other words you don't get "hands on" time with the interworkings of the machine. As a designer, you get to design the look and feel and interactions, but don't actually get to build it. The closest you get is in understanding the behaviors of a user, and augmenting patterns in the system to create a predictable outcome. As a designer, I could never get around these details. It bothered me to not be the builder. So, in order to overcome this problem, I learned how to code. The rest is history.