It is with great pleasure that I get to publicly welcome our newest team member, Mike Nygard. We've known Mike for a long time, and have been attempting to brainwash him into believing we deserved to have him join for nearly that long. After years of #hbb, too-smoky-to-drink-Scotch, and adopting a new language to play with, we finally managed the task.

Mike's bio:

Somewhere in the mid-90's, Michael went from "young hotshot" to "grizzled veteran". He's still not sure quite when or how that happened. It might have been the beard.

It might also be that Michael has worked in many different kinds of software development across many different domains, starting with assembly in the 8-bit micro days up through Java, Scala, and Clojure for massive distributed systems. That experience includes massive companies like Unisys, Best Buy, 3M, and Target, along with two startups that grew from 30 to more than 100 people, plus three terms as an independent consultant. He's always looking for people who know they can do anything, and that describes Relevance.

His desire to teach others shows in daily work, in speaking engagements, and in writing. Michael wrote "Release It!"—about building large scale systems to survive the real world, rather than just passing QA—and has contributed to several other books. These days, he is devoted to improving the odds that a client's system will make money for them, through a deep understanding of time, uncertainty, risk, ignorance, and architecture.

He finds it astonishing that the most buzz-worthy technologies of the past two years are Emacs, Vi, Lisp, and batch processing (Hadoop).

We were unable to convince Mike that we were really LivingSocial during his "interview". We did, however, convince him that we understood how to use parentheses appropriately when coding, and this seems to have done the trick.

Welcome aboard, Mike!