I'm Travis Mehlinger, and I do a lot of things.

I've been married to Lynn for 17 years and I have three kids. They are all very smart and creative.

I race go karts. I mostly race in the KC Metro with the KC Karting Association, though I've traveled to Texas for a few events, and I've participated in the British 24 Hour race three times. My career highlights are a third place finish in the Clubman class at the 2024 British 24 Hour, driving for Rethink Racing. I also ran three classes in the 2025 KCKA season driving for Lost Boyz Motorsports, taking the championship in KA100 and finishing second in LO206 Senior and LO206 Master.

I enjoy sim racing, and have since I was nine years old, when I received a copy of IndyCar Racing for Christmas. Today, I enjoy online sim racing in iRacing, with my friends at Rethink Racing. I've won my splits in the 2020 Open Indy 500, 2021 Fixed Indy 500, and the 2023 and 2024 Daytona 24 Hour. I'm a commentator for Sim Broadcasts and a member of New Dimension Racing, the premier broadcaster and sanctioning body for events in Live for Speed.

I've been a racing fan for my entire life. My earliest memories are from watching sprint cars at dirt tracks near home, and attending practice for the Indy 500. My wild and crazy dream is to be successful enough that I can eventually race in the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the 24 Hours of Le Mans 24.

I collect LEGO. I have many sets and they're overflowing my home office. My favorites are my complete collection of LEGO Icons modular buildings.

I also collect whiskey. I tend to avoid the most popular bottles and find local/regional distillers' products instead. I got into the hobby by trying (and to the best of my knowledge, succeeding) to acquire one of each bottle distilled in Kansas.

Like many people in the KC area, I enjoy making (and eating) barbecue. I make pretty good pulled pork and ribs. I'm not so good at brisket. I also enjoy cooking many things other than barbecue.

I work on software projects in my free time. I fired up this website early in 2026 so I could start showing them off. I like to build things to scratch my own itches, like EnduroBuddy, a web application for managing endurance races in iRacing.

At work, I'm a Principal Software Engineer in the Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco. I've worked on distributed systems in the cloud for most of my career, though recently I've been focused on how to most effectively and efficiently use AI tooling for software engineering tasks.