<%= "Michael Frederick" -%>

I have a passion for technology and software development. I was creating dynamic PHP websites by the time I was 16, although I did not fully embrace software development as a career until years later. I am genuinely interested in my work which makes life a bit easier. I am currently freelancing and available to do contract work.

Education

University of Wisconsin - Madison

• B.A. in Computer Science
• B.A. in Economics with a Mathematical Emphasis

What I write

How it all started

I started becoming interested in the Adobe Creative Suite products when I was 13 years old. I took Graphic Design classes throughout high school that mainly concentrated on Photoshop and Illustrator, but I started digging into other CS products on my own. I quickly figured out that you could only go so far with Dreamweaver and Flash without digging into HTML and ActionScript 2.0. By my junior year of high school I had HTML and CSS down pat and I was in the process of writing my first dynamic website using PHP and MySQL. I was never that great at ActionScript 2.0, but by the end of college I had spent a lot of time working with Flex and ActionScript 3.0.

Fun fact: the first dynamic website I created (a vacation rentals website) in PHP had user registration and login capabilities. The entire website did not contain a single POST request, everything was stored via GET. All user information (including passwords) was passed through URLs. Needless to say I didn't fully understand what I was doing. Talk about security. Funner fact: Someone tried to buy that website from me for $2000, and I declined thinking it had more value than that.

When I was 16, a friend of mine and I started a web development company called True Graphic. Essentially, we would go around to local businesses and try to convince them to hire us to make their websites, or we would find work on Elance. We ended up making about 10 websites total under the True Graphic title, about half of which were static and the other half were in PHP with hand-written CMS backends (at the time it did not occur to us to use a framework).

After high school True Graphic died down and I started doing freelance work on my own. Prior to my freshman year of college I got an internship at Sports Technologies, a Ruby on Rails dev shop in Connecticut. I had been reading about Rails for a while but did not really start to pick up on it until I had been at STI for a couple of months. It took me about 6 months to really start to comprehend Rails and the MVC framework. Part of the problem was that I was also new to UNIX and I was getting used to the command line in parallel to learning Rails. At one point I did a tutorial that I found in a Rails book and it showed me how implement a full CRUD system within minutes, a task that had been slow and tedious for me in PHP. I started to do less and less PHP work and started focusing more on RoR as I discovered how powerful Rails can be.

I have always been a mac guy. I love UNIX and while I do appreciate certain features of Windows (C# .NET), in general I tend to keep a distance between myself and Microsoft products. I remember being extremely excited about the rumors of a mobile phone being developed by Apple. At some point in the first half of 2009, prior to the release of iOS 3.0, I started reading about iPhone development. I was new to Objective-C back then and I found Interface Builder a bit confusing (partly because it was a separate application from XCode prior to XCode 4). It wasn't long before I was doing iOS development full time. Although iOS continues to account for the majority of my work, I have recently started focusing on Rails and other areas of development again as well.

Random facts

• I grew up in West Hartford, CT.
• I lived in Madison, WI for five years and recently moved out to Denver, CO.
• I went to the University of Wisconsin.
• I eat entirely way too much pizza.
• I love traveling and wish that I could do it more often. My girlfriend and I just got back from a 31 day trip to Europe.
• I hope to start my own business sometime in the not-so-distant future.
• Sometimes I ride a skateboard.

Incase you couldn't tell...I'm a nerd. Like a really big geek.

• I find hardware design very interesting (specifically CPU design).
• The iOS SDK makes me happy.
• My idea of an awesome vacation is a trip to the Worldwide Developers Conference.
• I get really excited when Intel announces their new roadmaps.
• I am addicted to Apple. I own almost all of their products and if Steve Jobs had asked me to be a part of the Human Centipad I probably would have said yes.
• I saw Tangled. In theaters.