About Mike

Tired of the rat race? I was too, until I decided quit my job in 2005. I’ve been self employed ever since. If you’re looking for advice, random musings, semi-coherent rants and a flagrant distraction from whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, then you’ve come to the right place.

My name is Mike Taber. I started Moon River Software as a way to bypass the corporate ladder and avoid what would otherwise be a lot of corporate red tape. In a large company, promotions tend to be guided by seniority which flies in the face of ability and talent. In a small company, you can advance quickly, but you’re still pretty limited in what you can work on by the company itself. Small companies really can’t afford to have a senior developer working on whatever he feels is appropriate at the time. Eventually, I decided I wanted the freedom that only working for myself would provide.

I started my career with a brief, 3 month stint at a start up multimedia company called 2K Innovations Corporation in North Carolina in 1998. I was invited to join full time as a principal, but declined after seeing how the company was being run. Later that year, I moved to Buffalo, NY to work for a wireless ISP startup called Clearwire Technologies. I bailed a couple years before it went under and sold its name, but learned a lot about working at a small company. I spent the next few years working for Wegmans Food Markets in Rochester, NY as a Programmer Analyst, providing me with the experience of working for a 25,000 employee company.

Following a short and incredibly unexceptional solo stint, I wound up at Pedestal Software in Boston. Pedestal was a start up that was acquired by Altiris two years later for $70 million. Six months after the acquisition, I started flying solo again and have been on my own ever since.

I have Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology where I concentrated on parallel software and artificial intelligence.