Mike Slinn

Biography


Time to read: 2 minutes.

Short Biography

Michael Slinn has 48 years of experience as a hands-on software professional and entrepreneur. He focuses on value creation, including business drivers, technology and development methodology. He has been recognized as a software expert in US federal court since 2001 and consults on contractual and patent disputes. A graduate of Carleton University, he received his Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics in 1979 and became a P. Eng. in British Columbia, Canada in 1983. He lived in Silicon Valley from 1996 to 2020, and now resides back in his hometown, Montreal, Canada.

Long Biography

Michael Slinn has been recognized as a software expert in US federal court, and has provided litigation support for contractual and patent disputes. A graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa, Mike received a B. Eng. in Electronics in 1979 and became P. Eng. in 1983.

Mike operates ScalaCourses.com, a website that teaches advanced programming concepts using the Scala language. Mike also writes extensively for his other main website, mslinn.com; Mike has published collections of documents about his experience as a software expert, large language models (LLMs), git, Jekyll and his plugins, the Ruby language, Django and Oscar E-Commerce, and the technology used in his audio/video studio.

Mike is a polymath – a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas and draws on complex bodies of knowledge to solve problems. Mike has 48 years of experience as a hands-on software professional and entrepreneur. He focuses on value creation, including business drivers, technology and development methodology. Mike has published 3 books and dozens of technical articles for software and engineering magazines.

Mike has been recognized as a software expert in US federal courts since 2001 and by a European ITC tribunal in 2014. Mike consults on contractual and patent disputes for plaintiffs and defendants alike.

Mike received an Electronics Engineering degree in 1979 from Carleton University in Ottawa. Carleton's EE program was unique at the time because it taught a systems approach that included both hardware and software. Mike was certified as a Professional Engineer in British Columbia from 1985 until 2003; after he emigrated to the US in 1998 he found there was no benefit to maintaining his Canadian P. Eng. status or converting it to an equivalent US PE status.

Since 1985, Mike has done technology evaluations for investors and underwriters for companies going public. He has worked with distributed systems since the late 1970s, including Telidon and Nabu (“the Internet before the Internet”), with Java and Java-powered servers since 1996, and with Adobe Flex from 2004 until the product's demise in November 2011. Mike has worked with functional programming starting with Lisp in 1986 and continues with Go, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Scala today.

Mike lived in Silicon Valley from 1996 to 2020, and now resides back in his hometown, Montreal, Canada.

* indicates a required field.

Please select the following to receive Mike Slinn’s newsletter:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of emails.

Mike Slinn uses Mailchimp as his marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp’s privacy practices.