I’m Mike Gunderloy. Depending on which corner of my past you come from, you might recognize me as an RPGer, an SF fan, the publisher of FACTSHEET FIVE, or a software developer.

True confessions time: I used to be a Windows software developer. A reasonably prominent one, even: I wrote or contributed to 45 books about Microsoft applications, wrote hundreds of magazine articles and web columns, edited magazines, trained other developers, got the MCT, MCP, MCSD, and MCSE credentials, and made my living writing .NET software and running a popular .NET site. I even contributed bits to more than one shipping Microsoft program, as a subcontractor working on-site in Redmond and remotely.

Then I got fed up with Microsoft. It took about fifteen years, but I finally reached the point where, no matter how good some of their software was, or how well-meaning some of the rank and file employees were, I could no longer stomach the corporate policies. You can read more about that in my posts What’s Going On Here?,  The Rest of the Story, and The Examined Software Life.

Certainly, reasonable people can disagree on these things, but for me, working with Microsoft tools and technologies is no longer an option. So I quit. I spent 2007 retooling myself with open source software, primarily Ruby on Rails. You can read more about my progress in the entries tagged Reinventing. Now I’m using this weblog to track links to stuff I find interesting and useful in my refactored career, as I proceed through life nearly Microsoft-free.

I’m much happier for having made the change.

Blog header image based on a photo by stock.xchng user woodsy