Mike Fortier Jr.

I started in game development, building in-game interfaces for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online for seven years. It was fast, creative, and deeply visual work. For the last twelve years I've been at Akamai, designing enterprise platforms and developer tools for the infrastructure that runs a significant chunk of the internet.

Those are very different worlds. Game UI is fast, visual, and player-facing. Akamai is CDN platforms, software where the user might be a network engineer debugging a configuration at 2am. The complexity and technical depth of that work is what drew me to it. My time at Akamai spanned three distinct orgs with meaningfully different scopes, so while it's been twelve years at one company, it's been effectively three different jobs.

What carried over between those worlds is how I think about problems. I work at the systems level. The kind of design that involves sitting with software architects and working through how something should be structured, not just how it should look. The object model, the API, the interface someone actually touches. Getting all of those layers to feel like one coherent thing is the work I find most interesting.

Good design doesn't come from one person's vision. The best work I've been part of has always come from real collaboration and honest iteration, bringing a strong perspective to the table and being genuinely open to having it changed by someone else's.

Outside of work, I'm usually building something. A mobile game. A smart home dashboard. A piece of furniture designed to fit an awkward corner of the house. I like making things, and I don't stop when I clock out.