Jerome Heuze
Web developer, indie game dev, and Traverse City local coming home.
Roots
Three stays across nearly 30 years — and a fourth, permanent one, is the plan.
I first got here in 1996 as a high school exchange student. I went to Traverse City Central High School and lived in Traverse City and Kingsley — a small-town year that stuck.
A year later I came back for college at Northwestern Michigan College (1997–2000). I earned an AA/AS in Art and Science, and I worked on campus the whole stretch — as a Librarian Customer Support and Clerk, then as a Computer Lab Technician helping students get unstuck.
Career
After NMC, the work went west. Twenty-plus years of enterprise web development — LifeLock, Revel Systems, Shift4, Edmodo, and now Global Website Operations & Development Manager at Atlas HXM.
The through-line is shipping sites that have to perform: React, Vue, Next.js, Laravel, headless CMS (Storyblok, Strapi, Sanity), conversion optimization, and SEO / Core Web Vitals.
The creative side
I’m also an indie game developer, building in Godot 4 and Defold, and the founder of The725Club, a retro Japanese gaming collection-tracking platform.
Under Heuze Productions I run a network of Japan-focused cultural sites. Indie games live at 10k Game Studio.
Why this site
I built TraverseCityTech to track and cover Traverse City’s growing tech, AI, and startup scene — 20Fathoms, TCNewTech, local meetups — while researching a move back. If it can be genuinely useful to people here along the way, that’s the whole point.
Contact
Say hello. I’ll write back.