MVDmakes things

I make software, art, and the occasional mess.Usually in that order.

Michael VanDyke. Engineering leader, artist, and lifelong maker in Louisville, Kentucky.

See what I've madeWork with me

Exploded view of a TV remote: top shell, rubber keypad, circuit board with an IR LED, two AA batteries, bottom shell, and battery door. BatterydoorBottomshellTwo AAbatteriesIR LEDCircuitboardRubberkeypadMVDTop shell
Fig. 1. Exploded view, TV remote. Move across the drawing to take it apart. Scroll to take it apart. The power button works.

Things I've made

  • The Refinery Hair Lounge

    A custom WordPress theme for a Louisville salon with more than one location. Stylists run their own profiles, and the owner can see whose profile brings in bookings.

    WordPress, PHP, Secure Custom Fields, GitHub Actions, Terraform, AWS Lightsail, PlaywrightClient work

    Spec sheet

    Client work, built from scratch. Each stylist has a profile with a headshot, bio, socials, online booking, and whether they are taking new clients. New stylists get an onboarding email, fill in their own profile, and it goes through a review step before it is published.

    Locations are a taxonomy, so one stylist can work at several, and each location has its own landing page. Service pages, a Google Reviews carousel, schema markup, and an llms.txt round out the public side.

    An admin-only booking leaderboard ranks stylists by Book clicks, next to profile views and click rate, so the owner can see whose profile turns visitors into bookings.

    Staging and production deploy from GitHub Actions as atomic releases with a one-step rollback, on AWS Lightsail defined in Terraform. Playwright and PHPUnit tests cover both the public site and the admin.

  • Groundwerk

    AI strategy tools for founders. Each one interviews you, pushes back on thin answers, and writes a document that has passed its own quality gates.

    Python, FastAPI, LangGraph, React, Postgres, VercelActive

    Spec sheet

    Two tools so far, brand strategy and business model, running on one engine. Each is an agent that asks its questions, follows up when an answer is weak, and writes a document that has to pass its own quality gates before you see it. A FastAPI backend serves the agent graphs; the front end is React.

  • Plane Poultry Panic

    A 16-bit top-down action game. Get through a chicken-overrun airport and catch the last flight out.

    Godot 4, GDScriptIn playtest

  • Ephemeris

    A Swift framework for satellite tracking. It parses Two-Line Element data and works out where Earth-orbiting satellites are.

    SwiftActive

    Spec sheet

    Built to do two jobs: a practical library for iOS and macOS apps that track satellites, and a teaching tool for learning orbital mechanics by reading the code.

All projectsEverything else on GitHub

Art

Installations, generative art, and music.

  • A black rotary phone labeled Hello Hun beside a framed letter on a wooden desk.
  • A pale crescent moon built from fanned lines on a dark purple background.
  • The alluvium. artwork, a black hole ringed by stars.

The gallery

Michael VanDyke laughing at a restaurant table at night, in a tan cap, round glasses, a light gray blazer, and a black shirt with a copper floral print.

Hi, I'm Michael

I'm a software engineering leader, a visual artist, and a lifelong maker. I lead distributed engineering teams through modernization work: moving old systems into the cloud, building observability, and making decisions with data. I stay close to the code, mostly Swift and iOS, Python, TypeScript, traditional AI and ML, and AWS.

As a kid, I used to take apart remote controls just to see the circuits, and pull pans out of the cabinets to play them like an instrument; not much has changed. These days that means woodworking, electronics on the bench, painting, and interactive pieces. The overlap between engineering and the creative arts is where I'm most at home.

I live in Louisville, Kentucky.