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.
My passion for high-performance culture, innovation, and the accompanying results guides me in my role as CTO, Americas at DEPT®. We are a full-service digital advertizing agency withan outsized weighting to technology services. The DEPT® technology teams do it all: enterprise data systems and business intelligence, digital products, platform architecture and implementation, immersive interactive experiences, and award-winning campaigns. We strive for a blend of innovation, scalability, reliability, and practicality.
I was active in the early DevOps community and was a co-organizer of Chicago’s first DevOpsDays. It was an incredibly supportive and fulfilling experience to be part the movement as it gained momentum and popularity. If you were wondering, I believe firmly that culture > tools. I credit my experience within the DevOps community as seeding my passion for building both software and human systems that support the delivery of work.
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 currently race for 606 Racing, of which I was a founding member in the fall of 2019.
The internet has accumulated plenty of my fingerprints, some of which you can find in these places:
Thanks for reading!