Mike has twenty-five years experience in the industry. He obtained a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from Ohio State University as well as an MS in Computer Scence from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He began his career in R&D facilities like the renowned General Electric Corporate R&D Center in Schenactady, NY and Bellcore in Piscataway, NJ. From there, he spent 11 years at CompuServe and AOL where he had the opportunity to participate in building out the infrastructure that supported the explosive growth of the Internet in the mid-to-late 90s. At AOL, he led teams both small and large whose missions included development of ultra-high volume web applications, broadband provisioning, registration & billing, and operations/monitoring tools.

After leaving AOL in 2007, Mike co-founded a startup dedicated to timeshare rentals. The experience was Mike's first opportunity to develop in Ruby with Rails and deploy to an on-demand scalable cloud platform. He immediately fell in love with the combination, and while he has since expanded into other languages and frameworks, he's vowed to never again build with anything that doesn't deliver the same combination of joy and productivity.

Outside of work, Mike enjoys spending time with his family of four in the great outdoors. He's an Assistant Scoutmaster and a not-frequent-enough runner. Mike loves to travel and is looking forward to exploring Europe over the next several years.