Nothing But Words

Mike and Maria in Tokyo, having dinner at Nozaki Shuten View at Picasa Mike and Maria in Tokyo, having dinner at Nozaki Shuten03-Jul-2010 07:33, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 100

Kai and Eidan, back in the Miharusou minshuku in Tanegashima View at Picasa Kai and Eidan, back in the Miharusou minshuku in Tanegashima02-May-2007 17:11, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 100

They say a good blog is supposed to be about one thing, to maximize my eyeballs or something, but I’m happy with just a pair, thank you. So my blog must be lousy since it’s about at least three different things. Here you will find blog posts about web development, especially WordPress and Agile techniques; my family's adventures and my various home improvement projects; and our travels, especially in Japan. I am not intimidated by semicolons.

I’ve been developing web applications since the days of Mosaic and HTML 1.0, when web pages were painted on cave walls using bison blood. I work at WebDevStudios, and previously at Penn (where I was Director of Web Development for SOMIS), Stanford, Ask Jeeves, E-Trade, and Georgetown. For a year I ran my own business, Kai's Candy Company. I’ve also tried my hand at being a construction worker, DJ, political scientist (I was ABD for a political science PhD), community college teacher, surfer, and gearhead. So I’m sort of like all the Village People rolled into one… but not really.

Highlights

toppa.com has been my personal site since 1998, and has over 800 blog posts. Here are some highlights:

• My Philly WordCamp 2011 presentation: Clean code for WordPress
• My 'Solving the Unicode Puzzle' article from the May 2005 issue of php|architect
• Japanese Baseball on the 4th of July
• Taking the Tokyo Train
• My posts on our vacation during Japan's 'Golden Week' in 2007
• Letter to the CS Monitor on Presidential Power from 2006 (I used to blog a lot about politics)
• Our 3 week cross country drive on route 50, moving from California to Pennsylvania in 2003

Other places you can find me online

• Twitter: @mtoppa
• Picasa: michaeltoppa
• WordPress.org: toppa
• Facebook: mtoppa
• SlideShare: mtoppa
• about.me: toppa
• LinkedIn: Michael Toppa
• YouTube: mttoppa
• GitHub: toppa