Hi, I'm Michael 👋

$192K+

saved for clients across 200+ n8n automations that moved staff off repetitive work.

73%

less time onboarding new clients, with a deployed onboarding automation and custom dashboard.

~81 hrs

of labor saved a month by a Slack bot that securely triggers backend automations.

15

Zapier Zaps migrated to n8n, so the workflows are sturdier, cheaper, and under the client's control.

Have a process that eats your team's week? Tell me about it.

1. 2025 — Present Current

   Founder & Principal Engineer

   Rubiconetic

   • One-person software studio. I do the product design, the architecture, the build, the store release, and the support calls after.
   • Shipped Scanity to the iOS App Store and Google Play. It's an ingredient scanner that resolves additives through their E-numbers, trade names, and synonyms across 452,000+ products; originally built with React Native and Expo, then migrated to Swift and Skip.dev for Android.
   • Built Scanity's data layer on USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts with nightly refreshes, and kept user data on the device rather than on a server.
   • Building MacroMeso, a diet and training engine that pairs macro targets with mesocycle programming.
   • Run the studio's production backend on a self-hosted two-node Kubernetes (K3s) cluster: about 115 pods on bare metal, including n8n, Forgejo, CI, and five Postgres instances. Client-facing n8n webhooks go out through Cloudflare Tunnels with no open firewall ports, and every admin tool stays behind Tailscale.
   • Deliver every cluster change through GitOps: Flux reconciles from Git, CI validates manifests with kustomize and kubeconform and rejects plaintext credentials, and Renovate keeps dependencies current across 90+ merged pull requests. Secrets stay encrypted in the public repo with SOPS and age.
   • Built alerting with Prometheus and Alertmanager to ntfy, backed by a dead-man's switch, and off-site disaster recovery on AWS with Terraform: encrypted nightly backups to versioned S3 storage, a least-privilege key that can't remove versions, and a drilled restore. The code and five post-mortems are public at github.com/michaelrubi/homelab.
2. Jan 2025 — Present Current

   Freelance Automation Engineer & Web Developer

   Upwork

   • Saved clients over $192K by delivering 200+ n8n automations, moving staff off repetitive work.
   • Cut client onboarding time 73% with a deployed onboarding automation and custom dashboard.
   • Migrated 15 Zapier Zaps to n8n, producing more robust and cost-effective workflows under client control.
   • Built a Slack bot that securely triggers backend automations for content generation and data processing, saving ~81 labor hours per month.
3. Sep 2023 — Jan 2025

   Personnellist

   United States Air Force (Reserve)

   • Worked with unit stakeholders to put new personnel processes in place, which kept actions accurate and on schedule.
   • Consistently exceeded assigned performance goals while serving part-time and moving into development full-time.
4. Jun 2010 — Sep 2023 13 yrs

   Avionics Craftsman

   United States Air Force (Active Duty)

   • Led teams of 8–15 technicians through avionics system assessments, troubleshooting, and repair.
   • Earned the 7-level Craftsman rating, the Air Force's senior technical qualification for the career field.
   • Managed logistics, tooling, and manpower for system assessments across concurrent aircraft.
   • Briefed technical detail, project status, and objectives to team members and senior stakeholders.

• BAS, Internet & Web Development

  ASU · Aug 2024

  Graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 GPA. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Git, and Agile delivery.

• 

  AAS, Avionic Systems Technology

  Community College of the Air Force

  Earned in service, alongside the 7-level Craftsman rating.

• Digital Marketing & E-commerce Certificate

  Google · Jan 2025

  SEO, campaign analytics, and e-commerce operations. Via Coursera.

1. Nov 3, 2026

   Drifting Away from PhotoCraft: Omapix Found Its Own Lane

   Omapix leaned hard on PhotoCraft for its first month, then stopped taking anything from it after October 20th. Here's why the borrowing dried up, what Omapix has been doing instead, and why I'm still watching PhotoCraft every day.

2. Oct 19, 2026

   Piggybacking on ArtCraft: Why My Oma Apps Got Easier to Build

   ArtCraft released open-source Rust rebuilds of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Figma right as I started my own Omarchy apps. Here's how Omacull, OmaLux and Omapix borrow from them, why they still need to exist, and why Omavec doesn't.