About

Overview

As you may have guessed by now, my name is Mike Roncone. My day job makes me a software engineer but people will tell you that I tend to do much more than that. I like solving problems in ways that people are willing to pay for. Sometimes that’s done by writing code, other times with nifty marketing or design, or an improved understanding business operations. There are very few skills that I’m not interested in improving.

If you follow along with this blog, you’ll probably discover that I have a hobby of pursuing different hobbies. You’ll get to see me struggle through things like learning the piano, figuring out how to profitably run an ecommerce business, building a SaaS company, exploring robotics, etc.

I currently live in Santa Barbara on the southern coast of California, and work as a Software Engineer at Procore Technologies where we’re building construction management software that helps teams finish projects safely, on time, and within budget.

Background

I’m originally from Chicago, Illinois and have what you might call a ‘non-traditional’ background for a software engineer. An undergraduate degree in Finance as well as a lucky combination of friends landed me as a Treasury Options clerk at the Chicago Board of Trade for a few years, where I wore a colorful jacket and yelled my face off with the rest of ‘em. From there I joined a market-making desk with Liquid Capital which closed their Chicago office less than a year later.

These experiences left me pretty disillusioned with the financial industry and so I decided to pursue web development instead. After burning all my savings while learning how to code, visiting Hong Kong and Thailand in the process (a different story), I landed a job as a QA intern at a local startup in Chicago to mark my entry into the ‘tech scene’. The rest, as they say, is history.

Why should you care?

You shouldn’t! Much of this site will probably be senseless ramblings as I try to work through whatever problems I’m facing that day/week/month. I’ve found that writing long-form prose helps me to understand my thoughts and solidify learnings. Many of these problems will be technology or business related as these are the things that I spend most of my time on.

That said, I hope to show the problems I’m struggling with across my wide variety of interests as well as the solutions that become apparent and the results that follow their implementation. With any luck, the solutions, lessons learned, or problems faced will be relevant to your interests as well and will provide some value. If you ever find something I’ve written useful, I’d love to hear about it. You can get ahold of me via Twitter.