About Mike
Your guide to AI-assisted development
Mike visits São Paulo, Brazil for a business ball pit.
Mike Terhar helps software engineering teams build better systems and live happier lives through observability and modern development practices. As a Customer Architect at Honeycomb.io, he partners with organizations to develop observability strategies that reduce on-call stress and enable faster, safer deployments.
Mike brings a unique perspective shaped by hands-on experience across the entire software lifecycle—from writing code to managing teams, from securing applications to responding to production incidents. This practical wisdom, earned "the hard way," gives him an edge in helping organizations transform how their people, processes, and technology work together.
Previously, Mike supported enterprise transformations at GitLab and Coder, specializing in DevOps adoption within federal agencies and financial organizations. His career spans regulated industries where he's served as a developer, manager, application security architect, and system administrator—experience that proves invaluable when translating best practices into real-world implementations.
When he's not helping teams escape learned helplessness, Mike can be found teaching others about AI-assisted coding and modern development tools. He currently lives in Keene, New Hampshire, where he's always on the lookout for fun experiences and activities that bring amusement to his family.
Workshop Philosophy
"I'm not crazy about lecturing people since I learn best by doing. My approach is to set you up with a bit of structure that you can use to make the LLM outputs easy to evaluate and reduce surprises. Once we have that framework, we'll walk through a few iterations of prompting and using the output to do the next prompt."