Derick Schaefer is a seasoned technology leader, consultant, and software developer with over 30 years of experience spanning engineering and executive leadership. His career began in the early 1990s with exposure to DOS, OS/2, UNIX, and VMS systems—sparking a lifelong interest in command-line interfaces and robust software architecture.

During a decade-long tenure at the Microsoft Corporation, Derick contributed to enterprise infrastructure technologies and authored influential content, including the 1999 white paper Development Considerations for Storage Applications in Windows 2000, which became a key reference for enterprise storage developers.
He later led technical strategy for a large-scale content management platform powered by a thousand Ubuntu Linux instances, where he championed CLI-first tooling and early DevOps practices.

In the years that followed, Derick served as CTO and SVP of Engineering across multiple SaaS and infrastructure companies. Confronting legacy systems written in Smalltalk® and C++, he encouraged teams to adopt Go for its clarity, performance, and maintainability.

In 2024, he began exploring generative AI to boost developer productivity and software quality. This work led to the release of the Go Input Sanitization Library (GoISL) and his first book, Integrating SaaS Acquisitions: A Technical Leader’s M&A Playbook—with this book soon to follow. He continues to consult and write at the intersection of developer experience, software design, and technology leadership.