This is the personal site of Mike Travers. I'm a software engineer, designer, writer, and researcher in the San Francisco area.

I'm interested in tools to make programming easier and more expressive, for children, scientists, and others. I got a PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in this area in 1996, focusing on the role of agency as a concept and metaphor in programming environments.

More recently I've worked on a wide variety of systems for scientific and medical computation. These application areas tend to have the hardest knowledge management tasks, and there is a huge potential for better software to support this. My work tends to have one foot in knowledge representation (ontologies, graph databases) and the other in user interface design. I work mostly in Lisp languages because they are the best for this sort of thing.

Contact

• Mastodon: @mtraven23@mastodon.social
• Twitter: @mtraven (winding down)
• Email: mt[at]alum.mit.edu
• Github
• LinkedIn
• I live in beautiful Pacifica, CA, south of San Francisco.

Professional

• Résumé with links to publications (pdf).
• Portfolio of user interface work (out of date).

Unprofessional

• Agency Made Me Do It is my new graph-based evolving open-notebook writing project; a successor to my old blog Omniorthogonal. Topics are varied and tend towards the impractical.
• I contributed the introduction to Inventive Minds, a collections of Marvin Minsky's essays on education.

Assorted Projects and Hacks

• Vaguely, a Scratch-like UI for simple data visualization
• Goddinpotty, a tool to generate static sites (aka personal wikis or digital gardens) from Logseq or other graph-based knowledge managers.
• Enflame, a Scratch-like visual query builder for a scientific graph knowledge base. Parts of this have been released as the open-sourc library Blockoid.
• SmartTables (article) is a public working version of a semantic spreadsheet.
• Visualizing the relationship between population density and politics with d3.
• Some small hacks to make the web work better
  • LinkBack, a Chrome extension for automatic backlinking (pushing the web an iota closer to real hypertext) (out of service)
  • Librium, a Chrome extension that detects ISBNs and DOIs on web pages and generates useful links.
• Various Common Lisp packages. These are mostly pretty old and not maintained:
  • A Heroku buildpack
  • WuWei, a toolkit for creating modern websites.
  • SWFrames, a semantic-web backed frame system
  • BioBike, a web-based programmable knowledge environment for computational biology. See the this paper in Bioinformatics.
    I designed the original knowledge representation framework and visual programing language.
• Older projects in Artificial Life and Visual Programming from previous life at MIT Media Lab.