About Me

Who am I and what am I doing here?

My name is Mike Sale and this is my place to share reviews, tips, tricks, and tutorials on Mac, iPad, iOS, Development, and WordPress.

You can get a good look at my work chops by going to Linkedin and if you’re interested in retaining my services you can contact me via https://michaelsale.com. If you have a question about something I’ve posted here please comment on that post and I’ll respond to you quicker than any other way you may contact me.

Mike at School

I graduated from UC Santa Barbara a long time ago! I enjoyed my time there and the education I received there was top notch! I took far too long to graduate no doubt, but I took advantage of office hours and academic collaborative opportunities throughout my time there. I considered an academic career, but my love of helping others and technical tinkering pulled me away.

Mike’s Career Journey

I started my time after UCSB working as a freelancer in Southern California working on dBase and non-linear video editing systems running on x86 and an IVR system running on “Concurrent Unix”, a unique inexpensive *nix OS running on x86 and integrating with Rhetorix boards. I then moved up to northern California after a time to get in on the fun living a short distance from the headquarters where dBase was in the midst of its conversion to Windows and the emergence of the commercial internet and inexpensive LANs with Novell. I started doing more development work with databases and connecting them via Perl CGI to HTML running on web listeners other than Apache. This was truly the infancy of the commercial internet and a time where businesses had to be convinced to buy a domain name! It was a fun time to be working in tech and a great place to live as a young man.

After coming to the realization that I was interested in a change and took on a substantial project to migrate a custom foxpro based association membership management system to Blackbaud running on Oracle 7 out in Colorado. I grew to love Oracle and it’s recoverability compared to other databases. The ability to recover beyond the last full backup with archive logs was a giant step forward, PL/SQL was just too cool, and I built out a highly customized Blackbaud solution. It was here I learned the many pitfalls of customization, better to look seriously at the impact of changing business processes to culture compared to the ongoing and permanent cost of customizing a system — better to focus on customization only where it creates a substantial competitive advantage and assign the ongoing costs to the profit center.

I planned on moving back to northern California but ended up meeting my future wife and decided to stick around and applied for a position at Oracle and stuck around there in various positions in different organizations for 17 years in total broken up by a stint at a bay area/international startup for 2 years.

After my time at Oracle I looked to see how I could expand my horizons and joined Avaya to direct their customer service web properties, knowledge-centered support, cloud offering, and digital transformation to an Omni-Channel “drink our own champagne” solution. It was a great time but the company was in financial turmoil burdened by debt in a time of rising rates that forced them into bankruptcy. I was a substantive part of seeing our way through that turmoil and at the end of my road there it became clear that they needed to shrink massively and focus on cost-cutting instead of innovation and transformation. This led me to start my own business and doing work with smaller businesses taking the experience in running cloud businesses at Oracle and Avaya as well as customer-facing digital properties and the engagement with internal processes and systems. It’s been great fun!

Leave a Comment