Mike Castillo Email & Phone Number

Crested Butte, Co

I am proud to be working with an extremely talented group of individuals at Couragion to help implement our vision of enlightening more individuals about STEM career opportunities. While my title is CTO, my responsibilities encompass pretty much anything technical at Couragion, I make sure we have the right products to support our vision, and that the products are rock solid, secure, perform well, and are fun to use. One of our challenges it to appeal to as many customer audiences as possible with limited developer resources. We need to have the right products, and they need to be great! We are currently concentrating on mobile and web, but we are very light and fast on our feet, and are constantly analyzing the effectiveness of our current solutions, and looking for way to improve.

Crested Butte, Co

Worked with a small team on a cloud based communications platform. The platform provides a easy to use developer friendly interface to the proven, reliable, robust Vail Systems telephony infrastructure. Worked on some core platform components, but concentrated on a platform SDK, several sample applications, tutorials and end user documentation. In charge of supporting existing, and creating new, speech-based self-service applications for one of the company's largest customers. This included maintenance and support of the platform the applications used.

Boulder, Co

Primarly working on products, and potential products, for Gold Systems, who mostly creates custom IVR (speech regnition and touch tone applications. Currently working on an ACD (automatic call distributor) product. Architecture, design, and implementation. Both server side stuff and client management applications.In 2011 we decided to build a replacement product for the Microsoft Speech Server 2007, which was end of lifed. I worked on the architecture, design, implementation, test and even documentation for the product. It supports running several different types of application types and includes a Silverlight, and even a Windows Phone 7, administration application. there is also a Silverlight Analytics (reporting) application.Around 2007 Gold Systems started expending less resources into products, at which time, I pursued interal products to improve our productivity in creating the custom IVR applications at a profit. Creating IVR applications is a highly competitive area. So my focus has been on creating a framework and supporting tools which would allow us to create applications more effciently, and create more reliable applications, that are easier and cheaper to test and easier and cheaper to tune. This has been a successful effort so far. The first project done with this framework/tools was remarkably efficient compared to other projects.

Architected and designed a new system to provision the Voice Mail product sold by U S West. The existing system was slow, and unreliable, and rejected a fairly high number of orders which then needed to be handled manually. In addition to designing the system, I implemented a large part of the system (java) and had three other developers working for me that completed the implmentation. The project deployed successfully with no problems and saved the company over a million dollars per year over using the previous system.

Worked in the system testing group for PBXs and switched (e.g. System 75). In summary, my carrer at Bell Laboratories introduced me to come really smart people and some very ahead of the curve software development practices and procedures. It still amazes me how low the curve for quality has dropped for software development now, especially web site/application software, which is abysmally bad. It's sad actually. I mean how often have your land line calls been dropped because of a swith software error? There are millions of lines of software running the switches that handle your land line calls, and your calls just always work!

Masters Of Science, Computer Science

What a great place to get a post graduate degree in engineering. Was able to take courses and interact with great thinkers like John.

Bachelors Of Science, Computer Engineering

Got a great education, with most courses leaning towards the electical engineering side of the house. The knowledge I gained.