Mike Gehard
Software Engineering And AI Lead at Rubber Side Down Technology Solutions
Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Gehard is a seasoned software engineering and AI leader with over 15 years of hands-on experience and more than 20 years in technology, currently leading engineering and AI at Rise8 while running his own consultancy, Rubber Side Down. He excels at translating business goals into pragmatic mobile and web solutions, pairing strategic product thinking with deep technical execution from APIs to cloud-native systems. His background spans leadership roles at VMware, Pivotal, and startups where he built and coached high-performing teams and shaped R&D direction. An active open-source contributor, he has meaningful Go work on exercism and contributions to Cloud Foundry logging, reflecting a focus on testability and backend tooling. He also teaches and mentors new developers, turning novices into effective team members—a persistent passion that informs his coaching-led leadership style. Trained as a chemical engineer with an MS in software engineering, he brings analytical rigor and a systems mindset to complex technical and organizational challenges.
15 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Software Engineering, MS, Software Engineering at DePaul UniversityBS, Chemical Engineering, BS, Chemical Engineering at Purdue University
Github Skills (26)
kotlin10
api-design10
testing10
command-line-interface10
tracks10
junit10
app-platform10
go10
command-line10
cli10
test-automation10
data-structure9
develop9
algorithm9
algorithms9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
cloudfoundry/loggregator-release
Jul 2013 - Apr 2015
Cloud Native Logging
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:21 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily worked on refactoring and improving the `dropsonde` package within the `loggregator-release` repository. Their commits involved extracting and modifying code related to application ID retrieval, ensuring better code organization and efficiency. Additionally, the user addressed missing package dependencies and performed various cleanup tasks, indicating a focus on code quality and testability.
cloud-nativeloggingcff-wg-app-runtime-platform
exercism/cli
Aug 2013 - Sep 2013
A Go based command line tool for exercism.org.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:79 commits, 1 comment, 1 issue in 1 month
Contributions summary:Mike primarily focused on building the command-line interface (CLI) for the exercism.org platform using Go. Their work involved initializing the CLI, implementing basic commands like "demo", "fetch", "login", "logout", "peek", "submit", and "whoami". They also added the ability to save and retrieve API credentials and implemented the functionality to fetch and save assignments. The user has also incorporated a testing framework.
command-line-toolgocommunity-contributions-paused
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