Michael Grafl
Profile
Hi. I’m Michael. I’m born in 1982 and grew up in Austria, regularly visiting Croatia. Things I enjoy include writing long love letters, taking close-up photos of people, producing indie rock, programming, and hanging out with cool people – in no particular order.
I have worked as an English tutor, at a youth center, in customer support, and as a web developer. At my last job I did a lot of Ruby On Rails and Javascript.
Software Development
I love building software. And I love being surrounded by people who do as well.
In early 1986 my dad brought home a Commodore 64 with a Philips monitor and a 1541 floppy disk drive. He showed me how to load a program into RAM and run it. When I was presented with a cracker intro by Eagle Soft Incorporated for the first time, hearing the dark soundscape generated by the SID synthesizer, I was smitten.
I wanted to understand this machine and make my own video games. So my dad showed me how to write simple BASIC programs, peeking and poking to produce weird effects, and I managed to draw a sprite on the screen by loading the individual pixels from data lines. However, I was unable to achieve a deeper understanding of what I was trying to do at that age, and I had nobody to teach me, so my coding skills stagnated.
As a teenager I learned some Pascal and C/C++. I bought Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows and Inside DirectX, a reference guide for DirectX 5. I managed to get a basic Win32 App running and to initialize a screen via DirectDraw. But I was also a troubled and horny teenager, spending ever more time brooding, recording music, and chasing after girls. I grew out of video games and started making websites for myself.
I kept making websites. I learned about Photoshop, typography, colors, and user-friendliness. I read Jeffrey Zeldman, Douglas Bowman, and Veerle Pieters. I made a template for my own Blogger blog. I made a template for my Wordpress blog. People kept saying nice things about them, so I kept going.
After a few stints at different colleges — where I wrote Java and C# — I moved to Vienna and started working as an intern at a webdesign company, where I could hone my Javascript skills. I went to my first meetup at a hackerspace and was so blown away by the presentations and so intimidated by (and drawn to) the tech-speak that I decided to learn back-end programming. I became good friends with a Rails developer, so I picked up Ruby on Rails.
A few months later I got a job at a company that used a RoR-Application to coordinate most of their internal going-ons. It was a big project. I was in over my head and felt like I would drown for the first few weeks. But at some point it all started to click. I got comfortable with the Unix command line and the Rails console. I looked behind the curtain to understand the magic of Rails. I became good friends with Git. I set up Nginx with Unicorn and wrote a script to automate deployment. I built slow things and then made them faster. I learned at a rate I had never learned before.
That job is no more. And I’m looking for a new opportunity to learn and grow as a developer. Because I love building software. And I love being surrounded by people who do as well.
Music
I started making noise on toy instruments when I was a toddler. I wrote my first songs when I was 12. I played my first rock concert when I was 14. I started recording at home when I was 16. I had my first single on the air when I was 27. I’m currently working on my first full-length album.
I’m bad with genres, but I think I make indie rock, mostly.
My current band is called Colombin.
I also make more candid solo stuff.
My first band had a funny name.
Writing
I enjoy writing, no matter what, as long as I’m interested in the subject.
At the moment I just have this personal blog, where I document bits of my personal life, giving up some of my privacy because I’ve always enjoyed reading about other people’s private life.