Mike Zornek

I’m researching how very small businesses (1–8 people) track their money and do their accounting, and I’d love to hear how you do it.

On my part-time client project, I’ve been working toward a feature for arbitrary refunds on an order.

I recorded a podcast with my friends from PhillyCocoa.

ElixirConf US 2026 happened last week in Chicago.

There is this wonderful story from the development of the original Macintosh.

While working on LocalCents, I had the opportunity to experiment with a lot of different tech, and one library that really impressed me was phoenix_test.

I previously blogged about What is Local-first Software?

Every project has way more things to do than resources allotted.

Taking a quick moment to celebrate some positive habits that have landed for me.

If you have experimented with AI coding tools or are considering it, one feature of the coding harness (the interactive shell you work in) you’ll encounter is skills.

On a recent client project, we set out to move ex_money to a new major version.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been using LocalCents as a place to experiment with AI code generation, and the raw volume of what I ship has climbed right along with it.

I want to talk through how my use of AI has changed over the last three years.

Everything I do to keep a codebase healthy (the CI checks, the standards files, the review habits) is in service of something I’ve never actually defined: good code.

When I have management responsibility on a project and influence to shape workflows, this is how I typically manage issues and pull requests.

You’ve felt this.

Not every consulting engagement starts with joining a team that’s humming along.

I once did some subcontracting for Test Double (wonderful consultancy btw, really good people there).

This is more of a personal journal entry than a typical helpful blog post.

I was using the GitHub Copilot web chat experience yesterday for client work.

Here is a hard truth: while I want to be viewed as an ally to accessibility, I probably would not score very high if you judged me by my actions.

With Phoenix 1.8, the authentication code generator inside phx.gen.auth has been revamped, favoring an emailed ‘magic link’ authentication flow.

One of the joys of self-employment is having a little extra control over your day-to-day schedule.

My full-time employment is coming to a close, and I am once again rebooting my self-employment life.

Took a few moments tonight to record a short demo of RankedVote.app (Project name: Flick) tonight.

I try to revisit my budget every six months or so, and having just wrapped up my taxes, which provide helpful totaling of where the money went last year, it was a good time to rebuild the numbers.

I host this site at Render.com.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some infrastructure updates to the website, and one of those changes was to drop the use of Google’s linked web fonts and instead host custom fonts from my own server in the spirit of improving the privacy of my si…

It is good to take inventory of things from time to time.

After a run of bad luck where I had to cancel Elixir-related conferences at the last minute (once because of the smoke storms that hit NY, and once because I got COVID before the conference), this week I enjoyed some time at Code BEAM America 2025 in San…

Local-first software is a term that came out of a research lab called Ink & Switch back in April 2019.

Yesterday I took to r/ProgrammerHumor to reply to this post about code review.

This past weekend, I added a feature to Flick (RankedVote.app) where we now present domain-specific DateTime values, like published_at and closed_at, on the live view page using the user’s time zone.

On the socials @jerzone shares: My super power is carefully combining a number of relevant questions in the same message so the person doesn’t have to spend a lot of time going back and forth with me on individual questions.

In March of 2024, I purchased a record player after seeing one at my cousin’s place.

In the closing days of summer this past year, I started to get an itch about building a new gaming PC.

With my side project Flick hitting an MVP milestone and inspired by some conversations during Elixir Book Club, I thought I’d take a moment to document some code aesthetic choices I made in this project.

When working with LiveView you’ll notice people naming modules with the suffix Live, as seen in module names like FlickWeb.Ballots.IndexLive or FlickWeb.Vote.VoteCaptureLive.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about June 2024 (and some early July things too).

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about May 2024.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about April 2024.

A local developer Slack had an icebreaker post asking for programming books that impacted your career.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about March 2024.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about February 2024.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about January 2024.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about December 2023.

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about November 2023.

I have some big news: Starting December 4th, I’ll be working full-time as a Senior Elixir Developer for Allovue, where they build web-based accounting software for school districts.

I’ve been a member (and organizer) of many professional-oriented book clubs in my career.

Monday, October 20, 2023 – It’s been over a month since I did a casual journal – so here we go.