Introducing Mikey

Team PledgeMe is growing! And we’d like to welcome Mikey Clarke onboard as our brand new Tech Wrangler.

Mikey is a developer extraordinaire who joins us from working for Globa.li, a hotel booking data aggregation app, where he was the main tech guy navigating the ins and outs of their code base. It was there he discovered that when making a hotel room booking, the code base neglected to allow for time zone differences between the browser, the server, and the hotel, so an arrival date could be as much as two days out. He discovered that physically unpeeling the Earth’s crust like an eggshell and smoothing it flat, so that every point on Earth would have exactly one time zone, would be less work than having to mentally juggle the three time zones.

Before that he was at PathWrangler, an adventure travel planning app, so wrangling is in his blood. He has a background in PHP and Rails, and says when it comes to dev he is a jack of all trades, master of some.

When Mikey isn’t coding, he writes. He’s currently working on a story about communist hippos who become sentient. Hippos also happen to be his favourite animal, so the PledgeMe commie hippo is Rory’s welcoming present to Mikey. He also runs. All over the place. He moved to Wadestown specifically for the gigantic galaxies of nearby running tracks. He says it’s good to get your blood pumping and your mind invigorated.

Mikey was told about the job here by our board member Breccan from Rabid. What enticed him about the role was that the description itself seemed super cool — especially the part about being in charge of the codebase. Also our super duper working environment here in the Biz Dojo Wellington was a big draw card because Mikey had been working at home for a while. Home offices are fantastic peace and quiet – but do nothing but that, and you get cabin-fever-ish. Human interaction is good, he says, and the BizDojo in general, and PledgeMe in particular, offers that in spades.

Cool fact about Mikey

He can clap with one hand! Like actually. It’s amazing ask him to do it for you.

Follow Mikey on the social medias

Mikey is on Twitter at @pi_neutrino

A word from The Man himself

I spent my early childhood in the slums of 1890s Paris. To fund my mother’s caviar habit, I slaved at the local Scurvy Factories. To pass the time, I allowed the Bohemians in the apartment upstairs to practice their wicked ways on me, and by age 4 I could down a bottle of absinthe in nine seconds whilst reciting a tune from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan opera, usually the song about tantric sex going out of fashion, the one they never dared perform at the “legitimate” operas.

At age seven, the Prussian Secret Service* kidnapped me to steal Bohemian spirits for their daily Naughty O’Clock Orgy Rumpus meetings with the Pope, Queen Victoria and Sister Teresa, but when my astonishing skills at mimicry convinced their boss that I was Jabba the Hutt in drag, they soon had me performing undercover in the Chinese State Circus as Fourth Ballerina, spying on the Empress Dowager Cixi. I soon fell deeply in love with her rustic peasant ways, and she taught me the noble art of flinging only the lightest of anvils through cathedral stained-glass windows.

Alas, war came, and I found myself in the thick of the Boxer Rebellion, where despite weighing only thirty kilograms they too gang-pressed me into their Prize-Fighter Exhibition Spectacular against The Mighty Maddened Mongol, a vast hillock of a man, famous in Peking for biting the heads off the more insolent mountains. To my eternal surprise, he proved most ticklish, and I won on a technical KO in nine seconds. The thousand-strong crowd bore me on triumphant shoulders to three hearty cheers and a rousing chorus of For She’s A Jolly Good Sheila, who also to my eternal surprise, then kowtowed and swore eternal allegiance to their Chrysanthemum Goddess. Tickling the overweight earns deityhood! Who knew?

The Qing Dynasty Royal Guard, alerted by the godawful smell, attacked our grotto at dawn, slaughtering most of my new worshippers to a man, and I escaped to Thailand by hiding inside Queen Victoria, in Manchuria on holiday. Victoria’s next whistle stop happened to be Wellington, where I leaped off the boat and hid in a random basement. Some days later I figured the immediate heat must have died down, staggered back into the building proper, and found myself in the BizDojo. My service for the Prussians had furnished me with Olympic bullshitting skills, and I convinced the good folk at PledgeMe that the few Mandarin hieroglyphics I’d scraped together under Cixi’s tutelage are in fact snappy Ruby on Rails code, which they tell me is something computery. I’m still somewhat sure they weren’t swayed, but a few dozen crates of Bohemian absinthe lubricated our Understanding admirably.

I still haven’t been rumbled! Can’t believe it! Pinch me! pledgeme.co.nz crashes hourly, but more bullshitting and ego-stroking and absinthe and once more I’m their Wunderkind. I live in hourly terror that the Qing Royal Guard will smash down BizDojo’s front door and begin torturing you lot as to my whereabouts. They’re tenacious bastards, they’ll track me down eventually. When they do, I’ll escape out the window in a flash, leave you all in my wake as reluctant human shields, and I’ll make a toast to your Heroic Sacrifice as I sip delightful cocktails in like Tuvalu or somewhere.

*They had an uncanny resemblance to these gentlemen: youtu.be/ltJ4mqYIr-E