I'm Mike Aparicio, a.k.a. Peruvian Idol. I was born and raised in the Chicago area and, aside from a two year stint in California, have lived here my whole life. I started my first website, Mikey's Chicago Bulls Page, after flunking out of the University of Illinois in 1994 and have been making them ever since.
I spent most of my career as a general "web guy" before joining Groupon in 2011. At Groupon, I built in-house CSS frameworks for our internal tools, consumer, and merchant websites and helped build a cross-platform design system. In 2020, I went to Provi, where I led the development of their design system, Fizz. I'm currently the Principal Design Systems Engineer at Turquoise Health, where I developed our design system, Pit Viper.
I occasionally stream Office Hours on Twitch, where I talk about and answer questions on design systems, CSS, Eleventy and other stuff, while doing a bit of live-coding.
Some of my active side-projects include 11ty Recipes, a collection of step-by-step instructions for adding new features to Eleventy sites, and Dogs of Dev, a website that's just pictures of dogs of people who make websites.
I did the writing and conservatory programs at Second City, which was as close as I'd come to fulfilling my childhood dream of being on Saturday Night Live. I wrote and performed sketch and improv comedy and collaborated on a few short comedy videos with my classmates.
I also enjoy playing video games. I've participated in Extra Life, a 24-hour gaming marathon, every year since 2014 to support Lurie Children's Hospital in honor of my daughter, Olivia. To date, we've raised over $49,000 for Lurie.
I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife, three sons and two dogs.