Hi. I’m Mike.
I’m a nerd at heart - a trained computer engineer turned to the software side long ago by the lure of faster feedback. I quickly discovered that I am passionate about building great teams and systems, and I work every day to make the lives of my teammates better and to attain a more holistic understanding of the world around me. As a leader I do my best to inspire my teams and foster a learning culture, with the ultimate goal of delivering high quality products and retaining happy engineers.
The passion to continuously improve guides me in my role as VP of Engineering at Critical Mass. We are a creative company, but software is the delivery mechanism for customer experience and thus Engineering strives for a blend of innovation, scalability, reproducibility, and practicality. My teams architect and implement the systems behind the customer experiences that Critical Mass delivers.
I am active in the DevOps community and am one of the organizers of DevOpsDays Chicago. It has been an incredibly supportive and fulfilling experience to be part the movement as it’s gained momentum and popularity. If you were wondering, I believe firmly that culture > tools. Having said that, writing code is a guilty pleasure - specifically the types of things that would be most readily identified as DevOps tools. I have a particularly soft spot for monitoring and infrastructure automation.
On my way to a career, I took an adventurous detour into ProAm bike racing. It was tons of fun and taught me a lot about what it feels like to pour all your energy into the pursuit of a goal. A few searches will turn up more than I’m willing to divulge here about my cycling days. I’ve caught the racing bug once again and have joined Burnham Racing for the 2017 season.
The internet has accumulated plenty of my fingerprints, some of which you can find in these places:
Thanks for reading!