Mike Rooney

While working in my capacity as the owner of Loopback LLC, I established great relations with the folks over at Pluralsight. As a result, I was pretty intrigued when they reached out regarding an acquisition. Once inside, I was able to greatly expand the quality and reach of virtual instructor lead teaching for Cloud Computing and DevSecOps. The developer bootcamps I made and delivered were excellent testing grounds for other Pluralsight products such as Skills and Flow. I took my observations regarding their usage and folded those improvements right back into their codebases. It was a pleasure to able to guide and mentor so many excellent instructors across so many technical subjects during my time at Pluralsight.

Prior to being acquired by Pluralsight, Loopback LLC focussed on delivering best in class training for all topics related to the cloud! All workshops and curriculums were multi modal with a thorough emphasis on establishing context via interactivity in a custom REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) environment - the perfect digitization of the Socratic method!

I had been looking for an excuse to move out to Seattle, so when Microsoft asked me to work on the Storage stack powering Azure, I didn't put up much of a fight. Through my time on the Storage Resource Provider team I interalized the supreme dedication and vigilance necessary to keep a world leading cloud in peak condition. Keeping customer data safe, secure, and available at such a scale is a weighty responsibility, and shouldering it helped to bulk up my engineering muscles. I am happy to have had the opportunity to design and develop critical parts of a massively scalable, highly distributed, ubiquitously accessible storage system serving the whole world.

After learning all I could from my fantastic coworkers at NetApp, I decided it would be interesting to ply my trade as a freelancer while exploring new opportunities. In the short period of time that I was on my own, I served as a Senior IT systems Consultant, an Instructor, a contract Coder and Day Trader. It was a wild ride.

I began working fulltime at NetApp while also finishing my Master's degree. I was sold on working at NetApp when they told me I could get paid to work on Open-Source code via contributing both Upstream core and NetApp-specific driver code to the OpenStack Cloud Computing Software project. Not only did I learn how to become an effective contributor to one of the largest Open-Source projects, but I also became a deft hand at DevOps by helping to maintain a sprawling CI/CD system that spun up 100's of new OpenStack deployments on a daily basis.

I was over the moon, or should I say Mars, to work for SpaceX. Never before had I been surrounded by such pervasive genius, and such disciplined engineering. Walking through the front offices of the Hawthorne facilities leads directly to a machinist's heaven--the entire SpaceX rocket assembly line. Most of my time was spent on operational network security and improvement of intrusion detection system capabilities, but I made sure to involve myself in a lot of my fellow interns' projects; I learned a *lot* about mechanical engineering.

Working at NVIDIA was a dream come true. NVIDIA GPUs have always powered my PC builds, and I was inspired to apply after competing in an NVIDIA hosted collegiate videogame tournament. The first day on the job I was thrown into the deep end and told I was to design a cryptographic co-processor to support Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for the Tegra System on a Chip (SOC). Quite the mouthful, eh? Since I had never touched ECC or any of the professional hardware design tools in use, you could say that I had to learn rather fast. The pressure was really on when I learned that I had an entire team responsible for implementing the analog design reporting directly to me! All the while I was living in a hostel with 3 bedrooms and 15 others from all around the world, but that's a story for another day...

Ah yes, my first internship, and what an experience it was! Unfortunately, I can't say much more... the NSA has a very extensive prepublication review process. If you are interested in seeing the three bullet points I was approved to publish, hop over to my LinkedIn profile.