Introducing Mike Hale

Mike Hale is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker platform. He’s also a collector of guitars, bizarre music and enjoys a nice cigar and bourbon in his downtime. He lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his family and his two dogs.

Show Notes

Website | http://mikehale.me

Twitter | @Mikehale

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now, the conversation begins. This is episode 15.

Liam: Hi! Welcome to Hallway Chats. I am Liam Dempsey.

Tara: I am Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Mike Hale. Mike is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker platform. He’s also a collector of guitars, bizarre music and enjoys a nice cigar and bourbon in his downtime. He lives in the western boroughs of Chicago with his family and his two dogs. Hey, Mike!

Mike: Hey it’s nice to be here.

Liam: Hey Mike! Thanks for joining us today. Your intro very much caught my attention. When I asked you to introduce yourself, you just have to explain and talk about bizarre music.

Mike: Bizarre music. OK. So I got on a kick a while back at a flea market finding old just weird foreign or obscure LPs. So I collect them. It’s pretty much anything that a record collector would leave behind. That’s the stuff that I like. So if it’s anybody you ever heard of or know of I want it. It’s been a couple of years that I have been collecting the LPs. It keeps growing. Someday I’ll figure out something fun to do with it.

Tara: So they’re actual vinyl LPs, viny?

Mike: Yeah usually.

Tara: And you bring them home from these things and listen to them?

Mike: Yep. I bring them home, clean them up, digitize them and go through them.

Tara: Do listen to them more than once? Or is it usually just one-time listening experience?

Mike: Some of them you have to listen to more than once. Some of them are just so awful, and some of them are duds. You get then home, and there is nothing really special about them. Those get the once over. But yeah, if it’s something unique and super interesting they kind of make their way into the rotation a bit more.

Tara: I would love to see what you do with those when you digitize them. That sounds like a very cool website someday to visit. That’s very interesting. I’m also interested (we talked a little bit before we started recording) about Rainmaker and what you do there. I’d like to hear some of what you did before that, what your background is and how you got involved with WordPress.

Mike: Sure. I’ve been in web development for probably close to about 20 years now. I started doing websites back in the late 90s; standard static HTML sites back in the browser war days when it was Netscape 1 .2. I was there for the introduction of tables. So I’ve been doing that for a while. I started in WordPress probably around about 2010 or so where I really started to do it on more projects and not just for my own stuff. The first time I used it; I had a project that I needed a site for. Rather than building one from scratch in .NET. I knew of WordPress. I had seen it here and there. I thought you know? I think I’m going to roll up my sleeves and dig into this to see if it’s something that I can make work a lot quicker. It was quicker. So yeah, before WordPress I did a lot of .NET stuff. It was ASP before that. I was working for a lot of bigger corporate clients. I did web app projects for places like BP, Heinz, McCormick,