Miker Irick

Software Developer, Musician, World-builder, Linguist

Software Developer

Having written code since 2003, I am an avid programmer who loves architecting elegant solutions to complex problems. I am particularly proud of my utilities for constructing fictional languages as well as my work in maintaining one of the longest running online roleplaying games, Legacy of the Sith, where I embedded Ruby-on-Rails into a C/C++ codebase from the early 1990's. I have worked professionally since 2014 as a software architect, and I enjoy writing tools for other developers. I also have worked on Unity game development as well as mods for Skyrim, Crusader Kings II, and Europa Universalis IV.

Musician

The son of a southern rocker, I was born to make music. From playing trombone in marching band to holding down the track on bass guitar, from writing lyrics to recording and mixing songs in the studio, creating music is an integral part of who I am. I enjoy playing blues and various types of metal. My greatest influences are Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, and Ronnie James Dio.

World Builder

Since reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in middle school, I have been enamored with fictional worlds, especially those with their own constructed languages. I have been working on my own fictional world for many years with a complex history and many different language families (often based on our own world's macro-families). This world serves as a setting for my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. In pursuit of this, I have become an avid student of history, especially the Late Bronze Age, early Iron Age, early modern Europe, and Sengoku Japan.

Linguist

As mentioned above, I fell in love with languages at an early age. While most of my knowledge is of fictional languages, such as Tolkien's Quenya, Okrand's Klingon, and, of course, those of my own design, I am functionally literate in Spanish and Latin and can speak and read Japanese at an elementary level (comes in handy for reading Ruby documentation). I am also able to read the Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew scripts, the latter of which have allowed me to read many Biblical texts in their source* languages. I have an interest in extinct and archaic forms of languages, such as Old English and Hittite.

* not necessarily the original sources as that is a VERY complicated subject in itself