When Michael de Armas packed up for a move from Havana, Cuba to Calgary in Canada nearly twenty-five years ago, he also took with him a knack for making practical things.
A software developer by trade, he spent late nights tinkering with things like the Google Maps APIs for his employer, and then built a hobby site that mapped every restaurant, rink, and playground in the city.
That experiment, which he hosted from home himself, taught him two lessons: (1) people love tools that make life simpler, and (2) Michael enjoyed making such tools available for folks.
By 2011, Michael’s side projects had multiplied.
He had built out websites for everything from looking up postal codes, to generating secure passwords, to getting map directions. But the most compelling out of the bunch? None other than CheatSheeting.com: a place where visitors could get their hands on handy-dandy “cheat sheets” for everyday conveniences such as unit conversions. Forget memorizing how many tablespoons fit in a cup; just one click and you have yourself a chart.
“I thought, why force anyone to remember obscure ratios when a sheet can do it for them?” he recalls. Traffic came from people searching for quick answers. Soon he added currency-exchange tables to the mix and, at the request of readers, even math charts for percentages and multiplication.
The site’s name, he jokes, is simply a “verbified” way of describing what people do: cheat-sheeting. But the mission is most definitely a serious one: democratize reference knowledge.
“I’ve always believed the internet — and everything on it — should be free for everyone,” he says.
