Michael Lang

Senior Software Engineer
New Relic

Michael is an accomplished IT professional with deep roots in both software development and hardware systems administration. His software development career began in the late eighties with writing DOS programs that interfaced with hardware plugged into serial ports and that sparked his keen interest in pursuing an understanding of how computers worked all the way down to the circuit level. Michael has parlayed his passion for technology into a long and varied career of tackling challenging problems in various fields from manufacturing to hospitality to medical research and billing and finance.

After several years as an entrepreneur building and leading Ruby on Rails teams as a hybrid engineering consultant and project manager for numerous clients, Michael returns to his programming roots at New Relic where he is now leading the Ruby Agent team through New Relic’s journey to open source their agents. His focus today is on buiding great technical teams whioe translating business requirements into working solutions. Michael is highly skilled in all areas of the Ruby ecosystem, be it the Rails framework, choice of gems (libraries) to use, hosting solutions, automating testing and deployments, and resolving performance and scalability issues.