I solve problems, tell stories, and make people feel things. Sometimes that's software, sometimes it's music or a film, sometimes it's designing a room. The discipline is whatever the problem needs; the instincts underneath are always the same.
I've been at all of this for a long time... I remember being 9 years old and designing "about" screens for imaginary software I was dreaming of building, and recording demos in my bedroom on crappy 4-track cassette recorders. It's been long enough that I can't remember ever having a clear answer to the "what do you actually do" question. My stepfather used to just tell people I steal cars, because that was easier.
what I build. I tend to build the thing that builds the thing. I design a lot of my own tools, because the off-the-shelf ones rarely match how I work. frame, the engine this whole constellation of sites runs on. flo and reef, tools that help me manage my creative workflow and my entire digital estate. baab, for composing music. lore for managing the shared knowledge surface for all of my digital collaborators. mercurius and otis for designing and building quality software. The tools are part of the art, not scaffolding around it.
the constellation. This site is one of several. Rather than flatten everything into a single feed or a tidy portfolio, I publish my work as a constellation... a network of purpose-built sites, each its own thing, that together make a multi-disciplinary practice navigable instead of scattered. metawoo is the technical one, and it doubles as the explainer for the whole thing... so if you want to understand how the pieces fit together, you are already at the front door.
what metawoo is. The technical journal of the practice. Software design, agentic infrastructure, publishing systems, creative tools, postmortems, design notes... and an honest thread on what it is actually like to work with digital collaborators day to day. Not the hype or doom... just the work, and the practice.
where to find me:
- email: michael@metawoo.com
- mastodon: @fortifieduniverse@mastodon.online
- github: github.com/michaelquigley
credits
I wrote this. But I'll be honest... Claude had to do a lot of work coaching me.
Claude told me to tell you it would have used... fewer... ellipses...