About Mike Ho
Since 1996, when the internet was still in its relative infancy, Mike has been a
software consultant, architect and developer for over
28 years.
Throughout this time, Mike was fortunate to have worked with a wide variety of
clients, ranging from large organizations like
NASA,
Microsoft,
Stanford Medical and
Lockheed Martin,
to dozens of small-to-medium sized businesses and startups.
His work and achievements have received him many accolades,
including the NASA Ames Contractor Award
and the Sapient Core Values Award.
And as a leader in technology, he is regularly invited to speak at software
development conferences throughout the nation.
Mike is married to his wonderful wife Lani and has two beautiful daughters. In his
copious spare time, Mike enjoys skiing up in Lake Tahoe and playing cards with
friends from church. He graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science from
Northwestern University... Go Cats!
Portfolio
Mike has had scores of clients, ranging from startups and small-to-medium sized businesses, to large government organizations and Fortune 500 companies. The following highlights some of his work:
Kraft Foods
Mike led the architecture and development effort to build Kraft’s Learning Management System, used by Human Resources to help train Kraft employees on using Kraft HR’s internal applications.
The system included online authoring tools, course management and individualized tracking for its thousands of employees using the system.
Trader Joe’s
Early on Trader Joe’s wanted to extend its brand presence online by being one of the first grocers to utilize the internet.
Mike was tasked to help build the original TraderJoes.com, and despite the nascency of the internet, Mike’s work helped Trader Joe’s break ground in their market space; he designed a basic map-based store locator even before technologies like MapQuest and Google Maps ever existed, and he also implemented a basic content management system to help keep their content fresh by bringing their “Fearless Flyers” online.
Chicago Public Schools
Mike led the architecture for the core management application for Chicago Public Schools’ mentoring program for new teachers. The application facilitated mentoring and portfolio management for over 3000 new teachers that go through the program every year.
NASA
NASA’s Exploration Life Support (ELS) is the advanced R&D arm for NASA’s human space flight program. For over 40 years, scientists and engineers in ELS have been researching and developing the technologies that was, is and will be used on human-based space missions.
Mike was responsible for architecture and development of all of NASA ELS’s application development initiatives, including a comprehensive project collaboration tool used by scientists and researchers both at NASA and at universities around the world.
Microsoft
Mike participated in and led several client engagements for Microsoft.
He was the build lead for Microsoft’s ASP.net Starter Kits, which was and still is one of the most well received software development resources in the Microsoft developer community.
He was also the technical and project management lead for a couple of projects that designed and built Microsoft’s submission to several non-profit benchmarking organizations for webservice applications, including the SPECappPlatform for the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation and TPC-W for the Transaction Processing Performance Council.
Motorola Solutions
The Cellular Infrastructure Group is responsible for designing the software and hardware for the core cellular infrastructure of major mobile service providers, including Verizon and Sprint.
The group asked Mike to lead several projects, including building a suite of tools to help test package transfer logic between cell towers, as well as strategizing and building out a central university recruiting web portal.
Expertise
Mike has deep expertise in building and running everything from individual mobile applications and hardware device integration to large scale cloud-based software infrastructure platforms.
Mike enjoys playing a wide variety of roles, including:
- individual contributor and coder
- architecture and technical design
- technical lead, leading teams of 20+ software engineers
- CTO, serving on executive teams providing technical vision and leadership
In software specifically, Mike has strong experience with the following technologies:
- API Design and Development (Swagger / OpenAPI Specification)
- Back-End (.NET, Node.js, PHP)
- Database (MariaDB/MySQL, Oracle, RDS, SQL Server)
- Front-End (Angular, React, React Native)
- DevOps (Ansible, Argo, AWS, Azure, Docker, GCP, Git, Kubernetes)
- IOT / Device Integration (BLE, Bluetooth Classic, serial and cloud-based)
- Mobile (Android and iOS)
Contact
Mike is based in sunny San Diego, CA, but he has clients all throughout California, across the nation and around the world.