Michael Adcock

MICHAEL ADCOCK

adcockm@gmail.com 425-894-1220  michaeladcock.info adcockm

• Commissioner of information architecture for the Monday Night Pinball League; a voluntary position as a board member. Also served as captain of a team, and frequent tournament director.
• Helped grow the league from 12 teams of roughly ten players each in 2014 (about 100 active), to the 36 teams that we now have in 2026 (over 300 active participants).
• Discussed and helped decide outcomes involving rules violations and disciplinary actions.
• Created and maintained a new player ratings system and associated tools to manage and maintain this system including a federated search system featuring dynamic ratings calculation.
• Performed various types of data analysis, informing strategic decisions. An example is my timing analysis and visualization, which suggested why some matches were running too long.
• Designed, publicized, and ran over 200 pinball events and tournaments of various styles and formats (including original formats), and a regular weekly tournament for over 2 years.

• Researched organization-related mergers and acquisitions to ensure the Identify Database provided current and correct information.
• Created a Perl script to automate the collection of RSS feeds for review, increasing productivity.

• Took on many roles including: developer/engineer, information architect, software architect, researcher, communicator, troubleshooter, data analyst, process analyst, and strategist.
• Built automated tools to shepherd documentation through a massive migration from the RightNow CRM service to the Salesforce platform. Quickly designed and built a local archive of the old system to serve as backup. The Knowledge Management lead estimated I performed in a “couple of days” what would have taken weeks or “1400 hours of work” for his entire team to do manually.
• Collaborated with the Knowledge Management team to build and improve their taxonomy, visualized the scope of and connections between user documentation content, created tools to identify broken links and orphans, and suggested better tagging to improve search results.
• Designed and created data-driven reports to identify, analyze, organize, and segment customers by how they configured and used our products. Worked closely with support, data teams, product teams, sales, and management to acquire information, understand needs, and share results.
• Presented my work on BI tools to senior management and the entire product management group.
• Supported migration of customer data from sunsetting products. Created tools to help understand content, scope of effort, track progress, automate, clean, analyze and report on the data.
• Regularly coded in Perl and Javascript, and updated existing Ruby, Java, and Python code. Worked with data in XML and XSLT, JSON, CSV, and other formats and automated production of Excel files.
• Applied data manipulation, visualization, and analysis tools including Open Refine, Gephi, Gource, RAWGraphs, TiddlyWiki, and D3.js in inventive ways; authored “IA of the Mundane” on Medium.
• Worked closely with other teams in various departments to build tools and provide analysis to help them better understand, automate, and improve their processes. Identified and documented more reliable workarounds for some legacy tools and processes.
• Presented a technical deep dive into my work at a professional development day event
• Solved support issue escalations and regularly answered programming questions from co-workers.
• Researched topics to inform new product development (lit review, surveys, analysis, findings).
• Presented for three years on topics related to my work at the Information Architecture Summit.

• Produced update for Project Tuva (Silverlight) website involving research and collaboration with subject matter experts, content strategy, information architecture, content authoring and editing, image acquisition and licensing, assistance with marketing, and final review and rollout.
• Engaged in community outreach at several conferences (iConference, InfoCamp, TEDx Caltech) and onsite technology demonstrations and discussions at Microsoft Research.
• Researched and created initial slide deck for TEDx Caltech presentation about Richard Feynman.
• Prepared Microsoft Surface 1.0 devices, collected research applications (like Garibaldi and LADS) through internal/external contacts, customized and supported devices, gave technology demos.
• Collected information from stakeholders and began update/redesign of Education and Scholarly Communication section of Microsoft Research Connections website.
• Researched and analyzed several technologies, including Academic Search, PixelSense (Surface).

• Created several proposals, strategy briefs, statements of work, annotated wireframes, and sitemaps using a variety of tools including Axure and Omnigraffle.

• Owned software prototyping effort (in C#) exploring PIM concepts for Keeping Found Things Found.
• Assisted other researchers in implementing and evaluating fieldwork pilot studies.
• Co-authored publication at SIGCHI 2008.

• Acted as project lead for an identity authentication product. Managed multiple software releases and shipments to the government agency client. Coding done in C++ and C.
• Identified goals for each release, created design documents and schedules, development lead for feature design and coding, closely worked with QA team, developers, and client to monitor progress, participated in bug fixing, provided guidance to offsite user documentation writer, performed software builds, and acted as release manager for final shipment to customer.
• Maintained a custom, legacy database designed for efficient, secure access to data.

• Participated in the full product lifecycle on many projects, from planning and implementing features to bug triages and release.
• Planned, developed, documented, and implemented IDE features and applications for developer tools including the Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ 6.0 and the Windows Smart Card Toolkit.
• Implemented operating system shell enhancements and custom applications for a variety of consumer products including media tablets, an HDTV, smartphones, an ebook reader, and other internet appliances.
• As lead developer, owned complete design and implementation of an ebook demo using custom hardware. Created specifications, scripts, applications, artwork, and final user documentation.
• Worked in a variety of situations including as a single developer, on small teams, across teams, and on larger distributed teams with contributors both inside and outside the company.
• Prepared source code for localization (both UI resources and internal code structure), and owned the localization development effort for a project, working closely with the PM and QA teams.
• Learned and used a variety of Microsoft technologies including COM, ActiveX, MFC, DirectShow, Windows CE SDKs and emulation, and Visual Studio.
• Presented a talk and gave a demonstration on “Developing Information Appliances with Windows CE” at the Embedded Developers Conference on February 6-8, 2001 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• Researched a new business opportunity. Searched for potential partners and customers, assisted in discussions, determined hardware and software requirements.
• Actively supported product demos and provided internal and external training on product usage.
• Created and maintained icons and graphics for several product demos.
• Maintained build and setup scripts and handled build issues for a project.

• Worked with a team of engineers and artists developing a 3D FPS game for Windows 95/NT.
• Owned game scripting code in Java and implemented classes and interfaces, including enemy AI.
• Connected the rendering engine (C++) with game scripting (Java) using the Java Native Interface.
• Used the Java Reflection API to dynamically load and instantiate each class from a map file.
• Wrote a front-end program in Visual Basic 5 to supplement a Java command line tool.

• Received IAI/FatDUX scholarship in 2008. Regular participant since.
• Presented on stage in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016, and presented a poster in 2024.
• World IA Day presenter and volunteer in 2014.
• Volunteered in various planning and review capacities in 2011, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

• UW IA Institute course volunteer lecturer and student project critique (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
• SLA Pacific Northwest panelist in 2014.
• InfoCamp volunteer and presenter (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013).
• UW ASIS&T iEdge coordinator, panel member, and participant (2008 to 2009).

• Co-captain of a team (2015 to 2016), captain (2017 to 2019).
• Continuing member of Board of Directors since 2017 with focus on data and website maintenance.