In case you were wondering, not that I have any reason to believe you were, Haacked is not my real name. Haacked started off as my blogger handle. It’s probably no surprise that it’s a play off my last name (Haack) and I use it everywhere: BlueSky, Twitter, GitHub, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, and so on.

If you’re into real names, my real name is Phil Haack. Nice to meet you!

The best way to reach me is to DM me on Twitter.

What I do

Right now I’m taking a break from full-time employment. I’ve been enjoying some time off, traveling to give a few talks, and doing a bit of consulting here and there.

Most recently, I co-founded A Serious Business, Inc.. We were the creators of Abbot, a hosted chat bot that helps teams make ChatOps a reality. You can learn more in my blog post introducing Abbot.

Before I started A Serious Business, Inc., I worked at GitHub doing whatever I could to make it even more awesome. Prior to that I worked at Microsoft on NuGet and ASP.NET MVC and helped to usher in Microsoft’s Open Source era.

I’m also a published author of several technical books and a regular international speaker.

Why I do it

Ever since I first laid my hands on my first computer, a TRS-80, aka Trash 80, I’ve loved computers and all the wonderful things you can make them do such as printing Care to play a game? in an infinite loop.

I also have a passion for managing and developing Open Source projects. There’s something immensely satisfying in working with developers all over the world on a common goal, and then sharing that product with all comers.

What I do for fun

What is it about American culture that causes us to ask people What do you do? and mean What is your occupation? rather than What do you do for fun?. And here I go propagating that mindset by putting this section last.

Oh well. Read my blog for a while and you’ll find I’m fanatical about playing soccer. I live in beautiful Bellevue, WA which has abundant hiking and camping opportunities. I also love to travel and listen to music with great beats way too loud.

In my spare time, I continue the Quixotic battle to correct the capitalization of “Github” to “GitHub” wherever I can.

License

All content on haacked.com is the copyright of Phil Haack unless otherwise stated. I license all blog posts under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 2.0) license. All code samples and the blog template are licensed under the MIT license. Note that some code samples are obvious implementations and not inventive. Those may be used without attribution.

Speaker Bio

Here’s a more condensed bio I use for conferences

Phil Haack loves to code. He also loves to build products and engineering teams, with over twenty years of experience in the software industry. He is currently a recovering entrepeneur and independent techno-drifter. That’s a fancy way of saying he’s taking time off and evaluating his options after shutting down a startup he co-founded - A Serious Business, Inc. (YC S21), the makers of Abbot, a Copilot for Customer Success automation.

Prior to A Serious Business, Inc., he was a director of engineering at GitHub and helped make GitHub friendly to developers on the Microsoft platform.

Prior to GitHub, he was a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, among other projects. These products had permissive open source licenses and was part of a concerted effort to drag Microsoft’s into the Open Source era.

Phil is a co-author of GitHub for Dummies as well as the popular Professional ASP.NET MVC series and regularly speaks at conferences around the world. He’s also made several appearances on technology podcasts such as .NET Rocks and Hanselminutes.

You can find him sharing his thoughts at https://haacked.com/ or on Twitter https://twitter.com/haacked or Threads https://www.threads.net/@haacked.

Sounds like just the kind of person you want to have a beer or coffee with, doesn’t it?

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