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BinaryMuse - Overview

Hi there, I'm Michelle Tilley (BinaryMuse) 👋

I'm a passionate software engineer focused on building developer tools that enhance productivity and improve the command-line experience. I believe in creating elegant solutions that make developers' lives easier through well-crafted, open-source software.

I also do independent AI research, with a focus on consciousness, computational functionalism, and novel AI architectures.

💼 Experience

Atuin

I'm currently working as a Founding Engineer at Atuin, building tools that transform how developers interact with their shell history and workflows.

GitHub

Previously, I worked as a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, where I contributed to several high-impact projects:

  • Primer Design System: Led the engineering effort to introduce 🖤 Dark Mode 🖤 to GitHub.com
  • Electron: Contributed to the development of this popular framework for building cross-platform desktop applications
  • Atom: Worked on Git and GitHub integration, as well as the core editor, improving developer workflows in the editor

🛠️ Technologies & Tools

Rust TypeScript JavaScript Elixir Ruby

React Svelte Node.js Electron Elm

Git PostgreSQL SQLite Docker

💡 Community Contributions

Stack Overflow

I'm an active contributor on Stack Overflow with 159k+ reputation, helping developers solve problems across JavaScript, Node.js, React, and more. I've provided over 1,000 answers across various web development topics, with particular expertise in:

  • JavaScript & Node.js
  • React & Frontend Frameworks
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Web Development Best Practices

🎯 Featured Projects

⚗️ Athanor

An experiment harness developed for AI research but flexible enough for any systematic experimentation. Write your experiments in code and manage them via a web interface, or via an MCP server. Written in Elixir, taking advantage of the amazing concurrency primitives the BEAM provides.

✨ Atuin

Magical shell history! Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, recording additional context for your commands. Features include:

  • 🔍 Full-screen history search UI (rebindable to ctrl-r and up)
  • 🔐 Optional encrypted synchronization across machines
  • 📊 Command statistics and analytics
  • 🌐 Multi-shell support (zsh, bash, fish, nushell, xonsh)

Built primarily with Rust for performance and reliability.

🖥️ Atuin Desktop

Runbooks that run! A desktop application that brings powerful workflow automation to your fingertips. Built with modern desktop technologies to provide a seamless user experience for managing and executing runbooks.

💬 Let's Connect!

I'm always interested in collaborating on interesting projects or discussing technology. Feel free to reach out!