About

First things first: why the weird name “steepvalley.net”? Well, when I started looking for an online presence, dobler.com was of course already taken. So I picked the next best thing – the literal translation of my last name – “living in or near a steep valley” (according to a heraldic certificate my brother gave me for a birthday – thanks bro!)

And now a little bit about myself: I’m Austrian by birth, semi-Swiss by marriage and semi-Canadian by choice. So crossing any border always gets me some special attention …

I started my career as a Construction Manager after finishing a civil engineering degree at a technical college in Austria. I soon found out that this was not my calling so I set off for Innsbruck and started a degree as translator in English and Russian. Half way through that I found my true calling and made my passion (computers and programming) to my profession.

I started as a a support manager at a software company for engineering software, moved into development (after a developer told me to get lost and fix the bugs myself when I complained once too often) and stuck to it in one way or another ever since.

This took me on a long path from working as a freelance programmer for a couple of construction software firms back in Austria to Software Development Manager for a direct marketing firm in Switzerland, moving to Canada while working as the in-house developer for an engineering firm, then moving on to become the Director of a consulting firm and, after that changed ownership, doing some Project Management for a Microsoft Dynamics partner.

Then a couple of years ago I was hired as a Principal Technical Consultant for the custom solutions team at Deltek and was happily coding again in my little home office here in Edmonton, Canada.

In April 2021 I made the decision to start my own business and now let’s see what the future brings …!

Cheers

Mike Dobler