Nothing But Words

That's Rodin's 'Gates of Hell' in the background... View at Picasa That's Rodin's 'Gates of Hell' in the background...

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

Welcome to Mike Toppa’s personal web site. Here you will find blog posts about Post to Post Links II error: Unrecognized type: cat_slug, especially WordPress and Agile programming techniques; Post to Post Links II error: Unrecognized type: cat_slug; and Post to Post Links II error: Unrecognized type: cat_slug.

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’m a Rails engineer for ElectNext. I was previously Director of the Web Applications team at Penn’s School of Medicine, and have also worked at WebDevStudios, Stanford’s HighWire Press, Ask Jeeves, E-Trade, and Georgetown’s IS. 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. I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to, but here are some past 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
• Post to Post Links II error: Unrecognized type: cat_slug
• 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