About

Hi, I’m Mitch Pirtle. I’m a nerd renaissance man living in New York City.

Thanks for checking me out. I’m a jack-of-all-trades that has been doing this for so long that I’ve found myself having grown both wide and deep. I build websites, I write all kinds of code, I start companies, I play hardcore bass, I skateboard, and I coach youth soccer as well as gaelic football.

Don’t ask about the gaelic thing, I’m not irish and it’s a long story.

Just think of me as the Forrest Gump of the Internet.

What do you do?

Code. I program in a great many languages, on many platforms. My specialty lies with emerging technologies, with a strong emphasis on Open Source. Most of my time is spent coding in PHP, although I also work in Ruby, Python, and occasionally Java. I am also enamored with non-structured datastorage, with my favorites being MongoDB and Project Voldemort.

Systems design. Oftentimes I am brought in as a consultant to help companies come up with a blueprint for a given initiative – maybe a new datacenter, or an entirely new web application platform. I’ve worked in a variety of environments and have a knack for stitching systems together that scale and perform.

Project recovery. I have inherited my fair share of derailed projects over my career, and at one point developed a reputation as a project saver (so much so that I ended up leaving the position to take on shiny new projects). Sometimes it is communication, sometimes it is a gap in needed skills, and sometimes it is just a flawed plan that needs a fresh perspective.

Start companies. We’ve all grown tired of the term serial entrepreneur, and I seem to be one that operates on little or no funding (bootstrap). I’ve helped businesses start new units internally as well as child offshoots.

Talk. As anyone that knows me well can attest, I have the gift of gab. My keynotes and conference lectures can be both informative and entertaining. Some conference organizers deliberately refuse to tell me what I am going to talk about, in order to make sure my session is as fresh and improvisational as possible. I’ve spoken about Open Source in the enterprise, social media, content management systems, development practices, and extreme scale needs for websites that got a little bigger than intended.

Coach. I coach youth sports, and am focusing on soccer and gaelic football. Baseball just didn’t get my attention. I’m a serious, competitive coach but my style is perfect for youth sports as I cannot contain the clown inside me. As I am basically a kid in an adult body, my athletes relate to me very easily and I have a knack for showing them the fundamentals in a way that doesn’t leave them bored, watching airplanes or eating grass.

Wine. I am a hardcore wine freak, and host private winetastings in New York City. Have gone winetasting in several countries, with many more remaining on the TODO list.

What have you done?

Open source. Probably my biggest claim to fame is being a founder of the super whack-daddy mega-gnarly awesome Joomla content management system and framework. Before that I was a core contributor for Joomla’s predecessor, Mambo. As we incorporated the nonprofit entity behind Joomla in NYC (that is Open Source Matters) I was the only founder physically present, so I have the unusual distinction of being the John Hancock of Joomla. (rimshot please)

Websites. This requires an entirely separate article I suppose, as I’ve been doing websites since 1995 for the likes of ClassMates.Com, Starbucks, Microsoft, MTV, Food Network, and on and on. The Quizilla website for MTV was a big success for me, as it handles some heavy traffic (think >50 million pageviews in a week). My involvement with ClassMates.Com was in the early days, and I remember the founder’s wife walking around like Star Wars’ C3PO from manually plugging in hundreds of credit card transactions by hand every day. I got automated payment rolling for them, forever endearing myself to the founder and his grateful wife.

Companies. Some were successful, some were well, not as successful. Most recently was Gilt Travel which launched as jetsetter, part of the Gilt Groupe. That was a great opportunity to play with some tech from tomorrowland, as well as push the limits integrating with external systems.

International speaker. I’ve spoken in many countries for many different events. Most notable was for the ITSMF conference in the Netherlands, where I found myself on a huge round stage in a room with about a thousand folks in the audience. Best moment was forgetting to turn off my iPhone, which was set to the duck quack for a ringtone. Right in the middle of my closing keynote, a guy in Jersey called me looking for a job. This was a huge room, so only the folks in the first row could hear. But it was quite obvious that none were prepared for my pants to start emitting a persistent “Quack!”