Derick Schaefer is a technology leader, consultant, and author experienced in high scale, highly regulated SaaS businesses.
During a decade-long tenure at Microsoft, Derick, a creator and user of command-line interfaces, found himself on ground zero of the graphical user interface evolution and the demise of the CLI. Despite, during this period he built and used CLI’s related to deploying enterprise infrastructure software 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 servers, 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.