Me

My name is Michael and I live in Scotland. I have a degree in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh but I’m an indoor creature at heart.

I love making things with code and occasional electronics - check out my Github or find a summary on my homepage to see what I’ve been up to recently.

Other interests:

• Music - I play guitar, bass, and infrequent piano. I love pedals, synths, and anything that makes a noise.

• Space and science generally - in particular, I love talking to my niblings about it and teaching them new things.

• Languages - I have used Duolingo daily since 2017. I have completed the German skill tree and I find it fun and interesting but I can attest that 1800+ days of Duolingo alone is not enough to teach you a language with any kind of fluency.

• Video games - mostly StarCraft II.

• I watch quite a lot of Youtube - some of my favourite channels in no particular order include PBS SpaceTime and Storied, Climate Town, Technology Connections, Not Just Bikes, KEXP, Adam Neely, WheezyWaiter, Ben Levin, VlogBrothers, Nahre Sol, Sixty Symbols, Simone Giertz…

• I started doing some yoga at the start of lockdown in 2020 and have kept it going on a not-very-regular basis since. I enjoy it but I’ve never quite reached the point of turning it into a proper habit - still trying though.

• I have a 3D printer which I mostly use to make incredibly mundane things like cable clips and organisers, and the odd artsy thing that crosses my mind.

beatonma.org

This site is my blog but I don’t really do blogging. It’s fun to work on the nuts and bolts of it though!

It is powered by Django, NGINX, PostgreSQL and Celery running on an AWS Lightsail Ubuntu instance.

The front end is built with SASS, Typescript, React, and pre-processed with Webpack and Gulp. The design and implementation is my own.

beatonma.org is built with the Indieweb in mind. It supports microformats and webmentions (via my library, django-wm.