Who I am

In case you were wondering, not that I have any reason to believe you were, Haacked is not my real name.

In the offline world, (which some prefer to call the “real world”), people tend to call me Phil Haack (pronounced, you guessed it, “hack”) — unless of course they are calling me more colorful names as is sometimes deserved.

Haacked is simply my blogger handle (creative, eh?).

What I do

I am a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft on the ASP.NET team, currently working on the new ASP.NET MVC Framework.

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.

While I love my day job, 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.

I currently lead the Subtext Project. Subtext is an open source blog engine on the ASP.NET platform. This is what this blog runs on.

I’ve also made small contributions to other projects such as RSS Bandit, Subsonic and MbUnit.

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’m in a fairly competitive local league, where my team is routinely beat down.

Living in beautiful Bellevue, WA, I take every occasion to go hiking and camping. I’ve also been to Burning Man twice, and would love to make it a habit if I could.

The picture above is from my first time at Burning Man, paddling away from sand sharks.