Portfolio · Michael Price
Everything here shipped for real users. Each project tells you what it is, the dent it made, and what it added to the engineer who walks into your room.
Founding engineer
I was there before the company officially existed, leading the first builds that got Pluto off the ground and into its first funding. It grew into the free streaming service millions of people watch, and Viacom acquired it.
What it built in me: I know what version one of a company has to survive, because I wrote it.
pluto.tv
Senior engineer · today
The crypto industry reads The Block every day: news, research, and live market data. I'm a senior engineer there now. Real traffic and real load, every single day.
What it builds in me: a working knowledge of what gives way at scale, refreshed daily.
theblock.co
Architect · led the build
The Block's B2B platform: news, research, data and charts, an API, M&A deal flow, and a RAG-augmented AI in one product, with each major application running as its own service. Trusted by names like Visa, JP Morgan, Google, PayPal, Discover, and NYU. We built it in months, before AI tools could carry any of the weight, with a human team aligning product decisions across the entire company. Nuxt across the stack, AWS ECS, Postgres, ElastiCache, CloudSearch, all managed with Terraform.
What it built in me: my first real test as a technical leader. Architecture, grit, and getting a whole company moving in the same direction.
theblock.pro
Built solo
A living cyberpunk city that runs in your browser. Procedural buildings, sector streaming, a real-time economy. Rust, WebGPU, and Solana. People swear this can't be done in a browser. There it is.
What it built in me: the habit of treating "impossible" as a project plan.
nexus.ghostnn.ai
Building now · pre-launch
Pong, evolved into a real-time multiplayer arcade game with money on the table. A Rust game server runs the matches, Box2D physics compiled to WebAssembly keeps the ball honest, and a Solana escrow program holds the stakes and pays the winner straight from the chain. I've been evolving it since 2020. It goes public soon, and then everyone gets to play.
What it builds in me: game feel, netcode, and money movement are three different crafts, and this one demands all three at once.
pongballz.com
Founder · building now
An AI gateway that gives teams governance over how AI builds. It studies the patterns and idioms in how your team actually ships, then keeps AI working inside those conventions, so every prompt produces code that looks like your team wrote it. Vibe coders get the discipline of senior engineers, systems stay in line with standards like SOC, and executives finally see what AI is contributing to the business.
What it builds in me: a front-row seat to where engineering is going, and the tools to keep it honest.
unyform.ai
Rebuilt from the ground up
An online dog-training school serving more than 30,000 dog owners, processing over a million dollars a year in courses, webinars, and workshops. I ported it off Joomla and rebuilt the whole thing: full data migration, full-stack modernization, Laravel and Inertia on Postgres, Docker and Kubernetes on DigitalOcean. A living business kept earning the entire time.
What it built in me: the discipline to modernize a revenue-producing system without dropping a single customer.
fenzidogsportsacademy.comSteward · 6 years
An HR platform that keeps policy manuals current with state regulations for more than 3,000 medical, dental, and veterinary practices. I ran it for six years: ported it from JavaScript in Blade to Laravel and Inertia, led the migration to a modern frontend, and tore through years of technical debt. It was astonishingly slow when I inherited it. Refactors, database optimization, and Redis brought it to sub-second loads at every turn, running on a smaller server than it started with.
What it built in me: the long game. Six years keeping one platform fast, current, and cheap to run teaches you which decisions age well.
hrdirector.bentericksen.comPrincipal engineer
I architected most of the technology behind their self-service and multi-product enrollment platforms, covering accidental death, medicare supplement, whole life, and term life. Those systems processed every new enrollment, over a million members, and hundreds of millions of dollars in policies. I built the first version, then re-architected it to kill the performance problems and got it running faster and cleaner than most of what the competition had at the time.
What it built in me: the zero-error mindset. When a million people depend on enrollment working, fast and correct stops being a preference.
Open source, tools, and the studio where the experiments live. Smaller pieces, same standard.
An independent studio and digital ecosystem I founded. The umbrella where Nexus City and my experimental work live.
ghostnn.aiA Claude Code skill that executes implementation plans with live verification. Every task gets an isolated agent that can see what it built: browser, simulator, API, or CLI. It iterates until the acceptance criteria pass. The page you're reading came out of it.
githubA project scaffolding kit for Docker-based development, written in Rust. One command stands up the stack, the services, and the conventions, the way a senior engineer would have set them up.
githubOpen-source profanity detection for JavaScript. Quiet, dependable code that teams run in production long after anyone remembers who wrote it.
githubA state management module for Leptos, the Rust web framework. Shared state across components without the ceremony.
githubJSON compression in Rust. Smaller payloads, same structure.
githubA focused Rust utility built for fast, reliable operations.
githubScan and analyze. A quick inspection tool for digital artifacts.
githubPure CSS percentage circles for Vue. No canvas, no SVG, no dependencies.
githubWeather in your terminal. Simple, beautiful, functional. I maintain it.
githubThirty minutes, free, no pitch. If I'm not the right fit, I'll point you to who is.