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jomurgel

About.

Trained as an artist, working as an engineer, thinking like an architect. Here's the longer, weirder version.

Jo — in glasses and a maroon hoodie, in front of a wall of framed art prints

I came to engineering sideways. Three art degrees first — graphic design, illustration, and photography — then about fifteen years building for the web, from frontend to principal to leading teams. Turns out the art degrees weren't a waste of anyone's money: they're why I care as much about how a thing is designed as whether it ships, and why I'd rather hunt down the actual problem than glue a template over it.

The most-watched movie of my childhood was Mike Jitlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time — one obsessive artist hand-building impossible effects out of nothing but ingenuity and craft. I didn't clock it at the time, but that was the whole blueprint: make something dazzling, do it yourself, solve the problem in a way nobody else would. Everything since has been a remix of that.

These days that shows up as a few overlapping things — maker, engineer, artist, photographer — which are really one instinct wearing different clothes. When I'm not doing the day-job version, I'm doing some lower-stakes one: shooting flowers, gutting a bathroom that never fit me, or arguing with a 3D printer. If you're after the professional version, that lives over onWork.

The Codex

All the other stuff that informs who I am — a living, overly-long list of things I love.

Albums

Songs

Books

Currently the Lady Janies series, because I'm a teenage girl. They're quite fun.

  • Dungeon Crawler Carl Series — Matt Dinniman
  • Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
  • Ready Player One — Ernest Cline
  • Ready Player Two — Ernest Cline
  • Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
  • The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Series — Stieg Larsson
  • The Harry Potter Series — despite the author
  • The Hell Divers Series — Nicholas Sansbury Smith
  • The Lady Janies Series — Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows
  • The Martian — Andy Weir
  • The Off-Campus Series — Elle Kennedy
  • The Tenth Planet Trilogy — Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch
  • Wicked — Gregory Maguire

Movies

Favorite is Wicked (2024) as of November 2024. Arrival falls to number two.

  • Arrival
  • Atomic Blonde
  • Attack the Block
  • Baby Driver
  • Back to the Future Trilogy
  • Cashback
  • Definitely, Maybe
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
  • Edge of Tomorrow
  • Employee of the Month
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once
  • Goonies
  • Happy Death Day
  • Happy Death Day 2 U
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • Mimic
  • Premium Rush
  • Rare Exports
  • Ready Player One
  • Ready or Not
  • Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
  • Running Man (2025)
  • Safety Not Guaranteed
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
  • Slither
  • The Conjuring
  • The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — US and Swedish
  • The Italian Job (2003)
  • The John Wick movies
  • The Relic
  • The Wizard of Speed and Time
  • Top Gun: Maverick
  • Tremors
  • Tremors 2
  • Wicked
  • Yesterday

Television

  • Alien: Earth
  • Bob's Burgers
  • Bridgerton
  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine
  • Firefly
  • Fringe
  • From
  • Ghosts
  • High Potential
  • How I Met Your Mother
  • Loki
  • Love, Death & Robots
  • Mythic Quest
  • Poker Face
  • Psych
  • Reacher
  • Rooster
  • Scrubs
  • Severance
  • Shrinking
  • Silicon Valley
  • Silo
  • Star Trek
  • Ted Lasso
  • The Big Bang Theory
  • The Curse of Oak Island
  • The Great North
  • The Magicians
  • The Rookie
  • Upload
  • Watchmen
  • Westworld
  • Widows Bay

Illustrators

Needleworkers

Sculptors

Typographers

Photographers

Podcasts

YouTube

The Owl House — 'And now, we feed.'
My favorite ʒaɪf. Yes, that's how it's pronounced — I have receipts.