Mike is an experienced, hands-on agile coach and software developer with 20+ years of experience who loves solving problems and working with software development teams. His specialties include Java, DevOps, Linux, Debian/Ubuntu, JavaScript, Python, Twisted, TCP/IP, SQL, git, hardware hacking and integration.

Before becoming an agile coach, Mike worked in small companies wearing both the systems administration and development hats. He has been involved with projects such as automating the build of all endpoint Linux machines for 7-Eleven Stores, interfacing to all manner of hardware devices in the stores, and recreating their backend services in Python using the twisted asynchronous framework. His career as a full-time practitioner culminated in managing a small team of developers through a complete rewrite of a legacy system.

More recently, Mike has worked as an agile player coach for companies including Athena Health, Sonic Drive-Ins, PG&E, and Cisco. For example, at Sonic he helped the teams improve and address their refactoring rate and legacy code challenges, including visualization of their code base. Mike also helped them create a reproducible Windows build environment on AWS with packer, terraform and GoCD, which gave Sonic build safety for their 100k+ systems and automated local build environment machines. While helping PG&E refactor their applications, he dockerized them for both local testing and deployment into a Kubernetes cluster on AWS a way to teach concepts around build automation. During his work at Cisco, he facilitated the deconstruction of a monolithic application into services to run in Kubernetes, helped build a system to increase their virtual machine decommission rates, and worked with multiple teams to guide their software craftspersonship to speed their release cycles.

Mike is known for his unswerving dedication to automation, efficiency, and usable security. He has a can-do attitude and deep technical expertise. He is passionate about software systems and helping clients reach project objectives by supplying them with the right sets of tools and knowledge it takes to get the job done.

Mike attended Oklahoma State University pursuing a BS in Computer Engineering. He lives with his girlfriend and dogs in Oklahoma City, OK where he is the organizer of the OKC Python User Group.