Mike Roberts

About me

A quick bio – last updated August 2010

Life

I’m English, was born in 1978 and grew up in the leafy countryside of Buckinghamshire about halfway between London and Oxford.

I didn’t travel far for university, taking the short trip up the M40 to Oxford at the beginning of each term. Oxford inhabits it’s own unique place in the world though and I very much enjoyed my 3 years there before returning briefly home for my first job coincidentally 6 miles away from my family’s house.

In 2000 I moved to London and over time grew very fond of living there. I took 6 month breaks away from the big smoke though, first in Boston in 2003 and then Auckland, New Zealand in 04/05.

For a long time though I’d wanted to live for an extended period in the USA. My 6 months in Boston had wet my appetite for the States and my time living in London had got me used to living in big cities. In Spring 2006 I packed up my life for the 5th international move in 3 years to New York City, with the plan of giving it a go for 3 years.

2 years into my New York experiment I met my now wife, and the move is now hopefully going to become a permanent one. We live in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Tech / work

Since the age of 7 I’ve been keen on technology, and software specifically. My first program was written in Logo and moved a robotic turtle around the classroom floor. Most of my childhood coding was in BASIC (BBC, GW, Quick and Visual) and by the time I left high school I’d already had my first payed job as a part-time network administrator of a local school and had entered the world of ‘enterprise’ software creating database applications.

My university studies were somewhat formal, but I was lucky to be in the vicinity of some outstanding minds. I was lectured by Tony Hoare once but unfortunately was far too ignorant (hungover?) to understand his lectures. The most practical elements of my degree were a short course on OO with Java, and also on the crossover between software and hardware design which landed me my first ‘hardware compilation’ job at Altera.

That role didn’t quite turn out how I’d hoped though so I took a 6 month Sys Admin position before leaving Altera and moving to DigitalRum, a startup firm which developed and hosted mobile commerce web and WAP sites. This was my first ‘real’ software job and taught me plenty of how (and how not) to design good software and run a software team. I left DigitalRum after 18 months to join ThoughtWorks where 4 of my DigitalRum colleagues worked with me for some amount of time (Mike Mason, Joe Walnes, Ian Bourke, Paul Hammant.)

My 4 years at ThoughtWorks were a fantastic experience and learning opportunity. I got to travel, work on some great projects, learn new technologies and agile methodologies, and meet some people that became amazing friends. While at ThoughtWorks I also managed to start writing a little, presented at some conferences, and also lead the CruiseControl.NET (with Owen Rogers) and Tree Surgeon open source projects, now used by thousands of teams across the world.

On moving to New York I joined another software consultancy, Finetix, where I worked with traders at a Wall Street (literally, I worked at 60 Wall St) investment bank.

In early 2007 I left Finetix to join-up with friend and former ThoughtWorks colleague Murray White to manage a software development team at the New York Stock Exchange. I stayed there for a year and a half but decided the ‘post technical’ life was not one for me, at least not at that time of my career.

In October 2008 I took the opportunity to lead a small team at DRW Trading‘s New York office, where I have worked since. We focus on developing high performance trading applications. It is a wonderfully liberating environment to work in – I’m able to take all the lessons I’ve learned throughout my career and apply them to the way we work without the constraints found in most consulting engagements or politically ravaged corporations. Furthermore I’m surrounded by a truly gifted set of engineers and traders and so my learning continues unabated.