Hi, I'm Mike Zetlow.

Web "portals" are everywhere: from banks, to insurance companies, to healthcare providers—businesses need a way to expose only a portion of their system to users. Often, that experience must be customized and branded. I show how we presented entirely personalized apps by extracting data from the company logo. Watch the 3-minute talk.

Fresh out of college after the dotcom bubble, I employed my computer science skills to the exploding online poker industry. I knew nothing about the game when I started. But I knew 3 things: statistics, SQL, and that the game was beatable. Watch the 3-minute talk.

I've seen some things in programming, but 10,000 lines of hard-coded data that was required to change daily was one of the most painful. Here, I demo how we were able to move all that data into a CMS, saving hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars a year in development costs. View the 12-minute demo.

Published on thinkgrowth.org, this was my way of addressing a common problem I saw within myself, on my teams, and among my leadership peers: there is just too much coming in. I offer my personal tips on both limiting and processing the torrent of info we get dumped on us. Read the 12-minute article.

Soon after I started Las Vegas Developers, I published an API that allowed programmers to access data from their talks. I show how developers can use this API as a data source for automatically updating their portfolios using my own portfolio as an example. (This was before I went totally minimalistic on mikezetlow.com.) Watch the 3-minute talk.

Dropbox went through multiple testing rounds to arrive at the highest converting landing page for their newest acquisition. The landing page redesign my team developed scored the highest in user testing, boosting user confidence and increasing conversions by 180%. Read the 6-minute article.

How can an insurance broker take a client's information once, send it to multiple carriers, and receive multiple quotes instantly? We enabled insurance management companies to set rules for carriers and policies, allowed them to build forms that referenced these rules, and finally provided a seamless experience for the broker where all these rules were validated in the background in real time. Watch the 3-minute talk.

Originally published in The Startup (an online publication with 8M+ monthly readers). "Broadly speaking, cultural values are the stuff people literally kill each other over. If there’s a culture clash in the office, do you think a cake or matching t-shirts is the right response?" Read the 9-minute article.

I do my best to give the perfect PowerPoint presentation on how to give PowerPoint presentations. The handout I provided to the audience at the end can be downloaded here. (The meta-point is that often the best way to deliver information is not through a slide deck at all.) Watch the 5-minute talk.

If you have a design system in place, and developers and designers are on the same page, you may not even need a wireframe or mockup to begin development work on a redesign. I show how my team was able to churn out rapid redesigns by writing our ideas on note cards that referenced components in our design system. Watch the 3-minute talk.

How I parsed tens of thousands of technologies listed on Wikipedia to create a large, universal open source list. (See the Github repo here.) I ranked occurrence in developer surveys to measure popularity. And finally, I used this list to generate a user-friendly autocomplete component. View the 3-minute demo.

My analysis of the common ways we indicate to users that the software is working in the background. To this day, cited by multiple designers, developers, and publications. When it comes to progress indicators, I've done every trick in the book in my career. Read the 8-minute article.

In this passion project, my co-founders and I were able to serve up like-sounding songs from a catalog of 30 million. We did this by scraping a ton of data off the web and APIs and allowing new artists to submit directly to us. Ultimately crushed by Spotify's Discover Weekly. View the 1-minute demo.

Creating a single system for back office software, broker portals, and field work was a challenge. But the increase in user satisfaction, feature adoption, and sales showed our efforts were much needed. We moved an app that looked like it was "from the 90s" to a modern, accessible, and cohesive design. View the 13-minute demo.

You don't have to be stuck in callback hell with JavaScript. With the example of a simple text formatting function, I show how we can use functional programming to write our code as clearly as we can express it in English. Watch the 3-minute talk.

This demo is mostly boring—I ask the user to do things, and he does them. But that's a good thing! The old version of this CMS was ugly and confusing and often required multiple clicks and screens to do the simplest things. View the 4-minute demo.

PunchCode (a coding bootcamp in Las Vegas where I was the lead instructor) followed up with some of my former students. I rewrote the curriculum and taught 3 cohorts of developers in one year and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. See the 2-minute video.

The most important page on your marketing website is the landing page. The second most important page for B2B companies is your "Contact Us" page. I discuss strategy and present the solutions that allowed us to triple conversions from 2.5% to 8%. View the 5-minute demo.

One big gotcha for JavaScript developers is the fact that objects are passed by reference. Changing a copy of an object will also change the values in the original. I show how we can create a deep copy of an object, store its state in React, and use it to diff changes between the copy and the original to create an "undo" feature. Watch the 3-minute talk.

Using a real-world project, I demonstrate responsive design and its implications. Every ~200 pixels of device width, we must ask ourselves: "what is the best design—that balances user and business needs—for this amount of screen real estate?" Watch the 3-minute talk.

My first viral piece, published in FreeCodeCamp's newsletter (15M+ readers). Featured on the front page of Medium for a while. They even hired a professional voice actor to read the article for the audio version. Which is crazy because it was simply a piece of content marketing I whipped up for CHSI Technologies. Read the 8-minute article.