Michael A. Regione

Hi! My name is Michael Regione and I am a Software Engineer. I live in the heart of the Poconos in Northeast United States in a Borough called Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. We are conveniently located about 90 minutes from both New York City and Philadelphia. Together with my wife, Jacqueline, and our miniature Dachshund, Abigail, we relocated to this area from our home in Austin, Texas in 2022.

I got into software development as a hobby around 2002. I begged my mom to take us to the local book store and purchase Beginners Guide to DarkBASIC Game Programming by Jonathan S. Harbour and Joshua Smith. Reaching the end of this book and creating a Breakout clone complete with a custom level editor solidified in me the idea that my future career needed to be in computers - - so long goals of being an archaeologist!

As I got older, my passion to understand how computers worked grew and brought me on a journey to learning C++, then C, then x86 Assembly, back to Win32 APIs, and back once more to Microprocessors and Circuit Design at Virginia Tech. It was thrilling to work at all levels of the stack and understand what was happening at an electrical level, and I was elated when I learned about Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) programming that expertly blended the higher level programming abstractions with the user's knowledge of the desired circuit.

My love for FPGAs is what brought me to my first career at National Instruments. After completely freezing during (and subsequently bombing) a Digital Engineer interview, I nailed the Software Engineer interview and was invited in for an internship to do early front-end work on LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite, the next generation of LabVIEW product tailored for 5G research and development. Concluding my internship, I was invited back for a full-time position which I eagerly accepted.

I spent the next 12 years of my career at National Instruments in a mix of Individual Contributor (IC) and Management roles. As a Software Engineer and Release Engineer for LabVIEW FPGA, I was exposed to C, C++, C#, WPF, XAML, GNU make, Ruby, Python, G, Perforce, Rally, TFS, Azure DevOps, and GitHub among others. In 2017, I moved into a Software Engineering Manager role and fell in love with the concept of servant leadership. Managing a team was a lot like delivering my features:

I needed to understand what my customer cared about (the individuals on my team)
I needed to evaluate multiple solutions and architectures to solve that problem (are they in the right role, on the right projects, or even in the right team)
I needed a regular feedback loop to ensure we were solving the right issues in delightful ways (speak often in 1x1s about their aspirations)

In 2020, I applied and was approved for the inaugural Business Operations Manager (BOM) role for the global Application and Driver Software department at National Instruments. This was an exciting role responsible for driving operational consistency across the R&D teams and being Chief of Staff for the Senior Vice President of the department. When COVID unexpectedly hit the United States and the Governor of Austin, Texas issued a stay at home mandate, the BOMs also had the difficult task of maintaining the department's productivity as we rapidly transitioned to remote work. On top of these core responsibilities, my position as BOM also afforded me the opportunity to be part of the integration team for a strategic M&A. I will always be incredibly thankful to our Senior Vice President and our Executive Vice President for giving me this unique opportunity.

Managing teams over the last 6 years has been an absolute blessing. I have had the privilege of matching so many talented engineers and engineering managers with projects and opportunities that pushed their careers forward. I have led numerous book clubs with my peers aimed at improving the capabilities of our own management team, including Kim Scott's Radical Candor and Jocko Willink's and Leif Babin's Extreme Ownership. In many ways, I'm still asking the same questions I asked 20 years ago - - how does this work, and how can I make it work even better?

In looking ahead to the future, I am energized by the direction that the software industry is headed in. There is a continued focus on articulating the value and ROI for investing in Software R&D, and an emerging focus on leveraging AI as a companion to accelerate the complex workflows customers encounter day to day across all industries and segments. If you are looking for an experienced leader to partner with on your company's vision for the future, contact me!