About Me

Hello! I'm Mike Love, an engineer with ~23 years in tech, based in a small village in Derbyshire in the UK. I'm interested in security, automation and performance, and I've worked at every layer, from networks and servers up to the browser. Want to hire me? Get in touch.

What I'm looking for

A permanent role where security, reliability and performance matter, working remotely, or hybrid if the office is within a reasonable distance of Derbyshire. I can start a month after accepting an offer.

Every layer of the stack

I started out in tech support, then worked as a sysadmin, email admin and database admin before moving into software development, operations and people management; I currently manage a team of five. I've done frontend and backend work, and recently a lot of AI-assisted development. That range means I can follow a problem from a slow React component down to a DNS record or a mail queue, and I usually know who to talk to when it crosses a team boundary.

This website

I designed, built and host grepular.com myself, and it's a good example of how I work:

One Go binary with every page and asset embedded, behind a reverse proxy that handles TLS and HTTP/3.
It locks itself down at startup with seccomp and Landlock, so it can't run programs or write outside its data directory, and runs as a non-root user in a scratch container.
A strict Content Security Policy with hashes for inline code, Subresource Integrity and Trusted Types, and no tracking, cookies or third-party resources.
Tested heavily: unit and integration tests, HTML validation, Playwright in Firefox, Chromium and WebKit, pixel-exact screenshot comparisons, WCAG AA accessibility checks and performance budgets.

I wrote about building it in New Website, New Technology.

Projects

Email Privacy Tester: emails you and reports which tracking callbacks your email client makes. I built it in 2010 after finding privacy leaks in mail clients, and have used it since to find problems in Apple Mail and others.
ParseMail: paste in raw email source and see its IPs, URLs, MIME tree and rendered parts. More about it.
Sanimail: a mail filter that sanitises HTML, inlines remote images and strips tracking parameters. More about it.
Docker images, including hardened scratch images with SBOMs and signatures.
More open source on my GitLab account.

Working with AI

I use AI coding agents every day, with guardrails. I run them in a sandbox I built, where API credentials are injected by a proxy so the model never sees them. Most of this website was written with an agent, and the test suite above is what keeps its changes honest.

Career

My skills page lists some of the technologies I've used across ~23 years.

Writing samples

I've written a tech blog since 2009. A few posts that show how I think:

Get in touch

Email me at mike@grepular.com, find me on LinkedIn, or see other ways to reach me.