About Praxiotic
Praxiotic is the consulting practice of Michael Whitehead, focused on correctness-first platform engineering: helping technical teams write software correctly and efficiently, and architect competitive solutions to hard problems.
The name comes from praxeology, the study of human action toward chosen ends. The practice is about effective action in software: doing the right thing, correctly and efficiently, while navigating the tradeoffs that make real engineering hard. Every system is a set of constraints. The skill is knowing which tradeoffs to make and which to refuse. That philosophy runs through the open-source work too, including Catallaxy, named for the spontaneous order that emerges from sound rules rather than central control.
About Michael Whitehead
Michael is a technical-first engineering leader. He writes code, reads codebases, and delivers systems. He also builds teams, sets architectural direction, and teaches engineers to operate at a higher level. The combination is the point: leadership that stays close to the work.
His career spans platform engineering across finance, telecom, SaaS, and national-scale infrastructure. He has built SRE organizations, modernized legacy platforms, designed integration layers, and shipped systems handling hundreds of millions of operations. Three companies where Michael built core technology were later acquired (by Olo, Qlik, and Rakuten).
Michael works primarily in Haskell, Rust, Scala, Go, and TypeScript, with deep infrastructure experience across Kubernetes, Terraform, NixOS, and AWS/GCP. He is a practitioner of functional programming, property-based testing, and declarative infrastructure, not as academic interests but as tools that make real systems more correct and easier to change.
He runs hands-on workshops in functional programming, Nix, Kubernetes, and property-based testing, built from the same delivery experience that informs the consulting work.
His guiding principles: nothing ships till someone touches the keyboard. Transparency, psychological safety, and the discipline of correctness.