Michele is a web developer at Smashing Ideas. When asked what she would like to do at Smashing Ideas, she answered simply: 'Code more, please.' Happily, this is precisely what she was hired to do.
Although Michele does not like to talk about her age and frequently dodges her birthdays altogether, suffice it to say that she began tinkering with code when she was 14. At the time, it was using a Basic cartridge in some flavor of 4 bit Atari console whose exact specification she no longer remembers. Later she got her paws on a Commodore 128 where she would spend far too many unhealthy hours indoors translating piano scores into MIDI because she was curious what it would sound like. Awful, to be honest, but it was fun. Michele is persnickety about nostalgia, but she has a bit of a blind spot for her old Amiga 500 with which she used to paint awesome pictures appropriate to the time period (the '80s). She tries not to think too hard about that.
Originally she fancied that she would be a designer and illustrator. Fresh out of high school, she got herself an Associates with a focus on commercial art. There were no computers in the old days, so she had to use actual pens, Xacto knives, wax and Letraset rub on type. She promptly used her talents to draw things for money - things like socks, underwear, and shoes. Things that were not that challenging or interesting. Thank goodness the Internet came along. She leaped at the opportunity to do multimedia and spent far too many hours coding and writing for MUDs. This is when she discovered that she really really really liked coding.
Eventually, Michele achieved some semblance of adulthood and went back to school to finish a BS in Software Engineering, thus ending her velveteen programmer phase and evolving into a code primate. Along the way she had many close encounters with C, C++, C#, Java and .NET. However, despite being cast among more well-heeled languages, she somehow ended up writing a great deal of ActionScript, then PHP and Javascript. And of course she learned to write HTML and got cozy with CSS. She is absolutely fine with that.
Lastly, Michele loves to learn new things. She is currently working on a Python Certificate at the University of Washington. She thinks Python is pretty darn cool and hopes to use Django where she would normally use CakePHP.
Drupal is nifty, though, and she can't stop puttering around with it.