Hello,
I'm Michael Barrett.
I’m a programmer who went to art school.
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48 hours in Pittsburgh
Tagging along on a work trip to beautiful downtown Pittsburgh, just long enough to visit the Andy Warhol Museum
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Virginia Jaramillo at the Bechtler
Notes on Charlotte, Waffle House in the rain, and Virginia Jaramillo’s retrospective at the Bechtler.
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Instagram in 2025
How I'm using Instagram in 2025. Making the most of a hostile platform.
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Visiting Monet at PAM
Visiting Monet's Waterlilies at the Portland Museum of Art
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April Art
Reviewing two art exhibitions, one by Laura Beth Reese at Blue Sky and one by Ben Buswell at Oregon Contemporary.
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Notes on Memphis
A long weekend in Memphis. Music, grits, ducks, and Elvis await.
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The last big grid
Back in January, Instagram changed the format of their profile pages from a 3-wide grid of squares to a 3-wide grid of 4 x 5 rectangles. This change probably reflects Instagram’s continued effort to become a generic TikTok clone for boomers. The 4 x 5 grid of rectangles is better than squares for displaying video previews.
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Tamara de Lempicka at the De Young
Sneaking off to San Francisco to see the Tamara de Lempicka retrospective at the De Young museum.
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A new year, a new microwave
Home ownership is a journey.
About
I grew up in Charlotte, NC. I attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After a brief stint painting murals and working in galleries, I earnd a Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, I began to experiment with web development, digital imaging, and large format printing.
After graduate school, I found my way to the west coast and into a software development career. My greatest expertise is in front-end engineering but I have also worked as a full-stack web developer and web service developerusing Java, C#, and Python. I have worked extensively with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and have worked with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
I prefer VisualStudio Code as my general purpose code editor on macOS. I prefer Procreate on the iPad for painting. I prefer Sketch on macOS for creating icons and graphics for the web. PixelmatorPro is pretty nice too.