About Michael
Michael Schwobe is a senior frontend developer with more than 20 years in design and web development. He has led frontend work for Baird, Thrivent, L.L.Bean, Ameriprise Financial and Bristol Myers Squibb, and his everyday stack is TypeScript, React and Next.js, with automated tests in Playwright and Vitest. He has a BFA in graphic communications from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. On binarytranslator.ai he builds tools and reviews frontend code before it goes live.
In Michael's words
After 20 years of frontend work, the bugs I trust least are the quiet ones: a number that's off by one digit and still looks right.
Questions for Michael
- What do you look for first in a code review?
- Number handling. JavaScript numbers lose precision above 2 to the 53rd power, so a converter that uses them for large values rounds without warning. The number tools here use whole-number arithmetic with no size limit for that reason.
- How do automated tests help with converters?
- In my day-to-day work I write tests in Playwright and Vitest. For a converter, unit tests cover the conversion itself, and browser tests cover what the user sees: the right result in the box and the right error for bad input.
- What makes a tool feel well built?
- It answers as you type, it tells you exactly what's wrong with bad input and it doesn't make you guess which box is which. Small things, but they're what people notice.