About me

Hello friend (I hope)!

My name is Mikaël Gramont, from France. I usually go by Mika, as it’s nicer to my ears (at least, in the US :p).

I’m a frontend developer. There are many titles out there for what I do: web developer, front-end engineer, UX engineer, etc. Some might say I push pixels around, but those are haters. I like to think that I build high-quality, fast, accessible and robust user interfaces, in line with today’s standards.

Okay I push pixels around, fine.

Some background

As this site is mostly out there for my web work, you probably don’t care all that much about what I like to do on the weekends or when nobody else is watching (no, not like that!). Doesn’t matter, let me bore you anyway!

My biggest thing is mountainboarding. Mountainboarding is a mashup of skateboarding, snowboarding and mountainbiking: you strap yourself to a board with big pneumatic wheels and you go down grassy hills, mountain trails, dirt jumps, skateparks, you name it. It’s a pretty obscure sport, I’ll give you that, but the cool thing with it is the community. I have mountainboarding friends all around the globe, and it’s really fun to meet all kinds of people who are so different, yet share the same passion.

Mountainboarding has done a lot for me. It’s the reason why I got into web development in the first place: I setup the first mountainboard community website in France around 2002. At the time I was a student in Electrical Engineering and all that database crap bore me pretty bad, but nobody else was going to do it, so I did.

After a while I started enjoying it a whole lot more, and rebuilt that site as www.mountainboard.fr. I learned so much! In the meantime, I spent a few years as a consultant in the automotive industry (not my thing, really), but thanks to my experience, managed to get a job as a web developer with a startup in Toulouse, France. If not for mountainboarding, I have no idea what kind of job I’d have today.

After that, I spent 6 years in the Bay Area, working at YouTube for most of that time, transferred to the Paris Google office where I worked at the Google Cultural Institute. After a year there, I moved to Biarritz where I joined OnRewind.

The rest

I also like to snowboard, surf and skateboard a bit. People have told me that that’s all the same thing. Is it? I don’t see it that way :)

Perhaps talking about how I like photography and have some interest in design would make me sound a little less one-sided, but I’m afraid of sounding like a hipster now. I will say, though, that you will never find me in line at Starbucks!

Contact me

Feel free to reach out on Twitter!