ANN: Introducing new Team Mach-II member -- Mike Rogers

[Peter J. Farrell]

Team Mach-II is glad to welcome our new member Mike Rogers to the team (see bio).  Below is a short interview we did with him.  We felt this would be a good way for the community to "virtually" meet him. We're really excited to work with Mike and feel he's a great asset to the Mach-II community.  Without further ado, on with the interview:

Tell us a little about who you are and what makes you tick...

The first question and it's the hardest. Who am I? I'm a marginally talented programmer from a small town in Indiana whose desire to write solid software has taken him through a dozen languages and countless frameworks only to settle on Mach-II. I'm driven by (as the great Larry Wall once said) a combination of Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.

What was the first thing you ever did with a computer that made you proud of your accomplishment?

When I was very young, maybe 8 years old, I wrote a baseball game in Q-BASIC. I remember showing my dad and getting him to say 'wow'. That was pretty fantastic. That was back in DOS 4.0, when real men used edlin.exe to modify config files.

What got you started using Mach-II?

I had just been hired into a ColdFusion environment coming out of a Java shop whose process I had built from the ground up to include Spring, Hibernate, Axis2, some unit testing and CruiseControl -- not too rigorous, but there was some structure. The shop I had hired into was using straight ColdFusion with no process, no framework, nothing. I needed more structure, so I started looking at frameworks. Mach-II was the cleanest, most efficient framework I could find. For the first time since Java I felt like my code was making sense, and that was a good feeling.

Mach-II has matured a lot since its inception. What are your favorite Mach-II features as of today?

I really like its integration with ColdSpring; the logging framework is also pretty spiffy. I hope to play more with that as time passes. The form taglib is also quite sweet; it's saved me a bunch of time with a few projects at work.

Everybody brings unique ideas and skills to the table. What one thing you feel you bring to Team Mach-II?

It's a bit too early to tell; my official contributions have been minimal. Unofficially my fondness for bourbon brings a certain drunken confidence that I feel the team was lacking prior to my arrival, though the merits thereof are open to debate. My hope is that if I revisit this question even within the next few months I'll have a better understanding of how I fit in.

Alternatively, I bring the beard.

It's an impossibility to spend 100% in front of a keyboard. What do you do for fun?

I work on my little farm, cook, and spend time with my wife. On our farm we have a horse, two goats, a pig, seven cats, three dogs and a flock of chickens. One of my favorite dishes to cook is french onion soup; it makes the house smell amazing.

If you were not a programmer, what would you want to do with your life?

A scenario too horrible to contemplate! Although I think I'd be a pretty passable Calculus teacher, or some other job with a high nerd factor.