I've met Mike Pall in person. I've worked with him some since I helped facilitate a sponsorship from Google (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2010/01/love-for-luajit.ht...). A lot of his work on LuaJIT has been supported by various sponsorships (see: https://luajit.org/sponsors.html). This gives him a lot of freedom to work the way he wants to, instead of working as part of a larger organization.

Also note that the sponsorship page says that Mike is currently working on "unrelated projects", so apparently things besides LuaJIT are keeping him busy now.

What did he work on before LuaJIT? Seems like he could have been involved in CPU design? He thinks more like a hardware guy than a C programmer.

I don't know that much about his background. I didn't get much of a chance to talk shop with him (which is too bad, I would have loved to pick his brain about all sorts of things). I also assume from the lack of info about him on the Internet that he's a somewhat private person, so I definitely wanted/want to respect that.

This won't do all that much to fill in any gaps in his CV, but here's something else he wrote: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=656