Mike McCaughan (Michael Daren McCaughan, to be exact), born to Renda and Peter McCaughan on the 9th of March, 1973, around noon. I’ve been wanting to wake up at that time ever since.

I was born on the island of Oahu, in the beautiful state of Hawai’i. And promptly moved to San Rafael, California. At around ten years of age, we moved to Wilton, Connecticut. In the middle of December. Culture and climate shock was great. “What’s all this white stuff blowing around?” “Umm… It’s called snow, Michael, get used to it.”

By the way, only my Mom, and possibly other relatives can get away with calling me Michael. I prefer Mike.

In any case, Connecticut was followed in 1991 with a jaunt in Amherst, Massachusetts for school at UMass. Great time, wouldn’t change it for the world. Except possibly that first semester of being an Engineering Major. That was boring. The next three+ semesters as a Theater Major were a blast though!

Dropped out of school for a year or so, to get my head together and move in with my parents. Who had since moved to Eden Prairie, Minnesota! Yes, successively colder places to live. Soon thereafter, I started back at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Back in theater, this time with a slight emphasis on directing. Graduated in 1996 with that powerhouse of a diploma, a Bachelor’s of Arts in Theatre Arts.

While I was still in school, I started working at Regis Corporation, as a help desk analyst. Paid okay money (for a starving college student mooching off his parents, that is) and I’ve been working with computers since the first 8088s rolled off the line (okay, 386s). Once I graduated, I went full time, eventually moving on to technical writing.

I got into too much trouble for using phrases like raison d’etre in technical specification documents, so I turned toward web development. I like to understand the inner workings of things (hence the Engineering major back in the day), so I started coding in Notepad, straight from the standards at the w3c. This was in the bad old days of Netscape 4, so you might be able to imagine my frustration. Nevertheless, I continued on, eventually writing some pretty good applications in a combinataion of SQL Server, VB.NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, XML and any number of related technologies.

And thus I came to a crossroads: Stay at Regis, where I had stayed for almost 11 years, teaching myself all of these great techniques, attending seminars and training classes, meeting people, but getting paid peanuts (well, relative to the industry average)? Or strike out and see what the market would bear, possibly getting burnt in the process?

I chose the latter, moving on to Rust Consulting, where I was working with a SQL Server/VB.NET/ASP.NET in-house application. Some new work but mostly copy-and-paste development. But, I was working downtown, taking the bus into Minneapolis from Eden Prairie. Pretty nice.

Except … I wasn’t really having much fun there and the politics became unbearable. So thus I started the search of a better, more challenging position. The good people at Rapid Application Deployment, a recruiting firm in Minneapolis, helped me find a job at Magenic Technologies, Inc., a consulting company based in Golden Valley. I’m a full-time employee of Magenic, with benefits and the whole nine yards, but I get to go to other companies and write code as a contractor. Nice. I don’t really have to deal with the politics much, and even when I do, I know I’ll be leaving soon enough. Extremely liberating! I’m doing the Microsoft ASP.NET work that I love doing! Best of both worlds.

So that’s me. Was that fun or what?