Hi, I'm Michael.
Fullstack engineer with production Rails and React experience. I build products across applied AI, iOS, and developer tooling.
Based in Toronto. Currently building Toki Pop and JobBook. Open to Fullstack engineering, client facing technical roles, and Applied AI consulting.
Built a local Japanese song study app for the Hugging Face x Gradio Build Small Hackathon. It turns pasted lyrics into listening lessons with furigana, vocabulary, grammar notes, tutor chat, Markdown export, and Anki deck export.
React, Gradio, FastAPI, Python, Janome, llama.cpp, and Tiny Aya Global 3.35B. Python handles deterministic language processing and exports; Tiny Aya handles translation, explanation, and tutoring.
Designed, built, and released a SwiftUI clock app on the App Store, including product direction, compliance, screenshots, and submission.
Published Rails engine for tracking LLM usage and provider costs, with 1,500+ downloads on RubyGems.
CLI for repeatable LLM evaluation workflows, used to fine tune and benchmark a local search relevance judge against 500 human labelled examples.
Built production features in an established Rails and React codebase, collaborating across requirements, implementation, tests, and release details in a client facing product environment.
Supported taxpayers in a high volume public service environment where clear communication, documentation, research, and calm problem solving mattered every day.
Find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, my blog, JobBook, and X.
Email me at hey@michaelpious.com.
I grew up playing video games, and still do. At one point, I made a Roblox game that received more than 10,000 visits. Useless talent: I can identify hundreds of historical tanks. I studied Financial and Business Economics at York U, Dean's Honour Roll, but kept taking game development and 3D modelling as electives because the pull toward building things was hard to ignore. After graduating I worked at the government: high volume, strict regulatory environment, learned to stay calm and communicate clearly under pressure. Eventually moved into software full time and kept that operating style. Now building Toki Pop and JobBook independently.
Trail biking around Toronto, serious hiking when I travel: Tateyama's Kurobe Alpine Trail, Hiroshima's Miyajima, Kyoto's Mount Daimonji. Japan is a long thread: studied it at university, visited, and still think about spending more time there. I build PCs for myself and occasionally for others. Music is all over the place: Japanese indie, breakcore mixes, pop, rock, Southern rap; a few examples of many. A friend once analyzed my YouTube mix and described it as "emotionally atmospheric music with strong subcultural identity." I thought that was fair.
