Mike Friedman is a professional Perl consultant from New York City. He has worked as a software engineer for several Internet companies, where he has exploited Perl's versatility by developing simple utility scripts to large object-oriented systems and many things in between. Recently, his work on a unique document indexing and search system won accolades in the magic community, where it was used as the primary research tool for a new biography of Harry Houdini, published in 2006.