Employee Spotlight: Mike Abney

This month we talk to Mike Abney, our Rocket League playing, amateur band rocking, and Star Wars loving Chief Software Architect.

Dylan: How long have you been working with Geoforce?

Mike:  I started consulting with Geoforce in February of 2016 and joined full-time 1 year ago this week.

Dylan: What do you do at Geoforce?

Mike: As Chief Software Architect, I work with Product Management, Hardware Development, and other groups, as well as the rest of the Software Development team to ensure our Track and Trace software platform supports our business’s growth and provides more and more value to our 800+ current customers and our future customers. I am focused on continuous improvement of the state of our software systems and the building of new and technologically innovative solutions.

Dylan: What are your hobbies outside of work?

Mike: Spending time with my family counts, right? Other than that, I play a lot of a video game called Rocket League (rocket-powered cars playing soccer). I am also in an amateur—we have never and probably won’t ever play a gig—rock band. I play guitar (badly), sing (not as badly), and do a lot of the mixing/producing on the little bit we record.

Dylan: If you won the lottery, what is the first thing you would buy?

Mike: The thing I wouldn’t buy but would semi-seriously consider is David Gilmour’s Black Strat (recently sold at auction for $3.5 to $4.0 million). The thing I would probably actually buy is a Tesla to replace my wife’s old Prius.

Dylan: What is your favorite attribute of Geoforce and why?

Mike: The people is the obvious answer, and they (we) are pretty great. Otherwise, it is the potential of what we could do. The hardware technology continues to evolve. Our software capabilities are expanding. We have the opportunity to be very key in helping customers improve their field operations and logistics, reduce waste and theft, and just make better data and operational insight driven decisions. And the scope is wide open across the energy, transportation & safety, agriculture, construction, mining, and many other business sectors.

Dylan: What have you gained from working at Geoforce?

Mike: Though we have plenty still to do, our software team has accomplished a ton in the last 18 months, which is extremely satisfying. We have greatly improved stability of the systems we manage. We are nearing the completion of our move to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will allow us to scale faster and continue to improve our customers’ experience even more. From there we will continue building a new set of APIs^* and other features to further improve our systems and provide more flexibility and value to our customers. The experience we have all gained and the support we have received from senior management, the Board of Directors, and throughout the company have been phenomenal.

* — An API or Application Programming Interface is essentially a web site for other software, rather than people, to use.

Dylan: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?

Mike: This is a tough one. There are lots of things I’d still like to see. I’d like to take my kids to England, which my wife and I have visited separately, but never together. That said, Disney World is opening a Star Wars park with a themed hotel later this year. That will be checked off my list as soon as I can get reservations, though that may be a while from what I have heard.