Mitch Burton

$ hello world

Hello!

My name is Mitch Burton, and I make things on and for the web, but I do other things too!

This site is a place where I can experiment, blog, and occasionally break things. My number one favourite thing to do is challenge myself to learn new things, so if you have an interesting project in mind, please let me know about it.

If something on here looks like hot garbage, or you just want to ask me something that won’t irreparably damage my self-esteem, you can contact me at [email protected].

Feel free to sign me up for as many spam mailing lists as you like, I can take it. If you like the design of the site, let me know! If you don’t, good for you!

What I Do, Specifically Speaking

Oh, someone actually read this far? In that case, I’ll tell you in a bit more detail what I do.

Currently, I’m a Senior Engineer at Canonical, working on the Landscape team. Landscape is a web-based management and administration tool for Ubuntu installations. Previously, I was employed at AWS on the Route 53 (DNS-as-a-service) team.

Below you can see a few other things that I’ve done or do in my spare time.

Web Apps

I’ve spent pretty much my entire professional career working as a full-stack web developer! I like to make stuff that does stuff. Neat stuff! Trust me!

This work included developing and maintaining a web portals, REST APIs, and large database-backed applications at scale. I prefer being on smaller teams, as it lets you experiment with new technologies, and come up with creative solutions – turning your own and others’ ideas into reality.

Programming Language Design

Programming Language Theory and Design is a passion of mine, and I do my best to incorporate this passion in all the work I do.

I’ve progressively gotten more and more into messing around with aspects of both functional programming and OOP and learning ideas from as many new programming languages as I have time for. During my computer science degree I tried to focus my academics on programming language theory.

Data Analysis

Learning things requires data, and data is one of the things I do best!

With my background in biochemistry, I started my career in a research-oriented role. I have a high-level working knowledge of statistical analysis, which I do not hesitate to bore people with. Give me a big, fat dataset and throw me in a quiet room – I can’t promise you’ll get the results you want, but statistically-supported conclusions are a thing of beauty.

Technologies I <3

Here’s the rundown on the tech I know and love. This section should be constantly expanding. Otherwise, I’m probably dead – someone tell my family! You can always diff this against my resumé to see if I've been lazy updating this section.

: Click one of the icons above to learn more about what I do with each.

Python: Python is one of the first languages that I learned, and still one of the ones I work in most frequently. I've listed it first here because it’s certainly my top competency. I use it for back-end development (mainly Django), statistics, and automating boring tasks.

JavaScript: I love JavaScript (and TypeScript even more) when I want to make something quick, like a prototype or an annoying Slack bot. I slay with Node in the back-end and perform feats of derring-do with React (or Preact) in the front. I also know jQuery, but I feel like that is becoming less and less relevant.

R: Although most of my stats work nowadays has moved to Python, I still have a soft spot for R. When I need to do some quick hypothesis testing or gen a sassy multilevel regression, I’ll often dust off the ol’ R shell.

SQL: I know enough SQL to avoid stabbing myself in the eye with a tricky JOIN or subquery contstruct. My preference is PostGres, and I’ll also use this space to mention that I’ve done some work with mongo.

HTML & CSS: I know both of these, yay! I’m a fan of Sass, and will use literally whatever template engine I can get my hands on.

Haskell (and others): I’ve been getting into functional programming a lot, lately. I primarily enjoy solving problems in Haskell, but my love for curry extends to Clojure and Scheme/Racket. Hopefully I'll get my hands dirty with CL soon and then I can really start annoying people.

Since you’ve made it this far, let me let you in on a little secret:

I actually enjoy writing documentation.

Do with this knowledge what you will.

MITCH BURTON