I’m Mike Belshe, a software engineer living in Silicon Valley, California.

I spent most of my career at startups, where I worked at Netscape (before it was a public company), Remarq (when it was still called ‘SuperNews’), Good Technology (when it still made sound cards!) and Lookout (before Microsoft bought it!). I enjoyed them all, but Lookout was probably the most exciting; it was the brainchild of Eric Hahn, and we co-founded the company together in 2003. Since then, I’ve been at slightly larger startups - 2 years at Microsoft, and now at Google.

My career consists of two unusually paired halves. In the first half I was completely a server guy with a passion for networking and low-level systems work. I worked on web servers, application servers, web applications, and mobile server clouds. I wondered why client guys didn’t know how to use threads, could tell you all about completion ports, fibers, and sockets, and yet I couldn’t tell the difference between PostMessage and SendMessage. Since then, I’ve evolved a bit, and hopefully have learned a thing or two about client software programming. Ironically, this skill is becoming increasingly obsoleted as applications move to the web! I hope there will be many more technology transitions in my career.