About
‘Mama used to roll her hair, back before the central air. We’d sit outside and watch the stars at night. She’d tell me to make a wish, and I’d wish we both could fly. Don’t think she’s seen the sky, since we got that satellite dish.’
-James McMurtry
Stalefish Labs is a one-person studio. I’m Michael Morrison, and I’m the person.
The name comes from a skateboard trick. You grab the heel edge of the board behind your trailing leg, mid-air, and hold it through the rotation. I learned it in the eighties, got briefly sponsored as a vert skater before that industry collapsed, and I still land it most days. The company started in 2002 with a physical card game called Tall Tales, and it has been the home for everything I make that’s mine ever since: card games, iOS apps, and the lab experiments in between.
The mission hasn’t moved since that first game. People needed each other long before screens, and fun is one of the oldest ways we’ve had of getting into the same room. Every product here is a version of that. Something to do together at the table, on the trail, at bedtime, in the stands. Simple, social, and seriously fun, and you are never too old, too young, too busy, or too cool to put your inhibitions aside and enjoy a good knee slapper.
Where the engineering comes from
By day, since 2009, I’ve been a contract iOS developer with Mercury Intermedia in Nashville. That’s how I ended up on the original CNN iPhone app, and on USA Today’s first iPad app, built against pre-release hardware in a locked room in Washington, DC, before anyone outside Apple had seen the device. Fox News, Xfinity, and The New York Times followed. The Xfinity TV iPad app I helped build received a 2011 Primetime Emmy Engineering Certificate for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development.
Before any of that I wrote 47 technical books on JavaScript, Java, HTML, and game programming for Sams, O’Reilly, Wiley, and Microsoft Press. If you learned to code between 1996 and 2010, there’s a fair chance one of them was on your desk. The full list, with sample chapters, is in the catalog on my personal site.
So yes, it’s a company. It’s also one guy with a day job, a mini ramp in the yard, and seventeen years of shipping apps at national scale, and all of that is true at the same time. I spent a long while keeping those facts in separate columns because that seemed like the professional thing to do. It wasn’t. The engineering judgment in these products was formed on somebody else’s flagship app, and the reason a one-person studio can ship things that feel bigger is that the one person has done this before.
The rest of it
I sit on the board of The Skatepark Project. I build ramps, jump mountain bikes, keep bees on and off, and race RC cars. I write essays about craft, judgment, and taking the harder path at michaelmorrison.com. That site is where the person lives. This one is where the products live, and the articles in The Lab are where I show the work behind them.
If something here made a night better, or isn’t working correctly, I’d like to hear about it either way. The contact page reaches me directly. There’s nobody else here to reach.