the human engineer on hmn

use your words

mike@hmn.engineer (michael meyer) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

this field has a lot of people who got here sideways. i’m one of them.

i know enough to get around. i can read code, understand what it’s doing at face value, catch something that looks wrong. years of working alongside engineers will do that for you, and honestly, it had to: you can’t manage a technical team from a position of total bewilderment. but building something from the ground up was always where i’d hit a ceiling. i was a GUI guy in a world that occasionally required a terminal.

going with the flow

mike@hmn.engineer (michael meyer) — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

let me set the scene.

it was late 2024. our team had just made the decision to move our entire mac fleet from Jamf Pro to Fleet. renewal was coming up. we didn’t want to renew. this was fine.

the timeline we gave ourselves: 9 days.

the migration backstory is here. what i want to talk about is the engine underneath it: the Okta Workflows system that made the whole thing run itself.

the migration that made us curious again

mike@hmn.engineer (michael meyer) — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

in november 2024, my team migrated macOS device management providers from Jamf Pro to Fleet Device Management. it took 9 days. it went well. and i’ve been meaning to write about it ever since.

here’s the thing about writing a migration story over a year later in my world: the landscape has already shifted. Apple shipped native MDM migration support in macOS 26, complete with admin-set deadlines and enforced re-enrollment. Jamf announced a unified Platform API ecosystem at JNUC 2025 that addresses a lot of the API fragmentation we ran into. the world has moved.