Michael Bayer is a software developer in New York City, best known as the creator of the SQLAlchemy Database Toolkit for Python as well as Mako Templates for Python. He has worked in the New York interactive industry since 1994 with a wide array of databases and web technologies, settling upon Python as the home for an "ideal" software development platform in the mid-2000s. His initial open source offering, the Myghty template engine, provided the early underpinnings of the Pylons web framework, which along with its current successor Pyramid remains the "spiritual" home of the SQLAlchemy and Mako products.