About Mike Hodnick

100_1274 My name is Mike Hodnick and I'm a Lead Consultant at Inetium - a Microsoft partner located in Bloomington, MN. In my job I work on projects where we customize and hack SharePoint until it submits in agony. While I focus on the SharePoint product, .NET and ASP.NET programming (usually C#) are at the heart of what I love to do. I also spend time coding 3D with WPF and WPF in general.

I've worked for Inetium since the end of 2004. Prior to that, in 2002 I worked as a Lead Developer at Nextel Partners (no longer in existence) building intranet ASP.NET web applications - oh the days of .NET 1.0. Before Nextel Partners I worked at Alto Consulting - a Microsoft partner in the Twin Cities area. Before Alto I had an engineering career in the manufacturing sector. I worked as a Manufacturing Engineer at a small circuit board shop in Hopkins, MN named Advanced Circuits - which was bought by Allied Signal, which merged with Honeywell, and then completely shut down shortly after I left. Prior to Advanced Circuits/Honeywell I worked at United Parcel Service in their Industrial Engineering department - where I actually did classic ASP programming against SQL Server 6.5. All of my gigs have been in the Twin Cities area.

I grew up in Duluth, MN and lived there for about 25 years. I went to Duluth East High School and graduated from the University of Minnesota Duluth with a degree in Industrial Engineering. Despite that the only Comp Sci class I took in college was Fortran, my interest in programming and web technology skyrocketed in college. I loved tinkering with my personal student web site, HTML, CSS, CGI and Perl, and wrote a few Java Applets. I learned Visual Basic 5 on my own, which completely confused me while I was also trying to learn object oriented programming.

The Hodnicks These days I live in Chaska, MN with my beautiful wife and daughter, Nicole and Eva. We've lived in Chaska since 2003. Prior to Chaska I've lived in Crystal, MN and Falcon Heights, MN (adjacent to the MN State Fair grounds).

I write music, play drums, and do a lot of home recording. My main instrument is drums, and I've been playing since I was twelve. I also play guitar and bass, am self-taught on those instruments, and it shows. I love heavy music, but will pretty much listen or play anything. Yes, anything. Most people say "anything but country" or "anything but rap". Country is just pop rock with a twang. Hip hop is just... like no other genre. The best paying drum gig I ever played was a polka gig at a VFW. I've played a number of concerts with the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra - most notably I played on Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. I taught drum lessons for a while but really didn't enjoy doing it. I've also played a lot of jazz gigs around the Duluth area (Duluth has an incredible jazz scene, by the way. Just kidding.).

I'm a Minnesota Wild season ticket holder. I love hockey. I love camping, hiking, and traveling. I've at least driven through every US state except Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Alabama. My right foot is crooked and angles to the outside by about 10 degrees. I have a strange appeal for llamas and alpacas. Some days I absolutely hate technology and want to go live in the mountains. Some days I can't get enough of technology and don't own enough computers or know enough programming languages. I like the dark, rain, snow, and quiet. Most of all, I think about how big the universe is and how small the Earth and humans are... and there really isn't much of a point to living in this blink-of-an-eye life unless you lighten up, barely take anything seriously, and have fun.