Mike McNeil

Mike McNeil is the founder of The Sails Company and Balderdash. Mike started Balderdash to build real-world use cases with Node.js. It began as a web and mobile studio with a focus on responsive design and realtime chat-like features.

Over the years, Mike hired and collaborated with amazing people on all sorts of ideas and businesses, from startups to the Fortune 500. Balderdash took on bigger and bigger projects: larger timescales, more mature budgets, and advanced business+operational needs.

Then, somewhere along the way, the open-source Node.js framework Mike had built only out of necessity exploded in popularity. At first, they thought it was a fluke with NPM statistics, and that the GitHub issues were from people they just never happened to meet on past projects they worked on. But by 2013, it became unavoidably obvious. Turns out lots of people want to build robust, scalable APIs using only JavaScript.

In the space of a few months, Mike and their team became "the company behind Sails.js".

Every day Mike got to innovate on cool user experiences and solve tough Node.js technical problems for our clients. At night, they paraded around like some open-source starship commander leading the JavaScript diaspora.

Sails is free and open source software, and by itself, that doesn't pay the bills. But the popularity of the framework brought a lot of attention, and some interesting professional service engagements.

Meanwhile the open source framework benefited from everything Mike and their team

Mike McNeil graduated from Y Combinator with a degree in Computer Science. Mike then went on to get their field degree in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.

Some direct reports include Eric Shaw - Community Manager, Rachael McNeil - Lead Maintainer.