Michael Harrington

With us since: May 2009

AO, for me, was love at first sight. The culture and dedication to doing things the right way was unlike anything I had ever seen. I got my start as an intern/coffee bitch, and quickly got up to speed on Linux, Ruby, TDD, and vim. After running the gauntlet of everything from embedded to web to mobile development, I was hired in December 2010 following my graduation from Ferris State University.

My degree is actually in Digital Animation and Game Design, and my personal passion is in doing crazy things with game programming. For example, I wrote Space Invaders in COBOL.NET, a path-finding algorithm in F#, a C# binding for Allegro (a C game library), and I’m designing a concurrent, message-based language extension for Boo with plans to throw a small game engine on top of it.

My professional passion is to help people understand what technology can do for them and then make it happen. I love playing around with new tech, especially programming languages. Whenever I find a new language, I try to understand the designer’s philosophy and explore every corner of it until I know for sure the “right thing” to do in that language. Three of my favorite languages right now are C#, Ruby, and Boo.

Outside of work, I like to spend time teaching my peers on forums, getting people (especially kids) interested in programming, philosophizing about programming as an art form, participating in game jams (short game development competitions), and playing indie games. I’m also interested in positive psychology, street art, art history, sailing, origami, theoretical physics, story development, and mythology.

Projects I’ve been involved in:

• A Lua system testing library for embedded devices, with a nifty DSL and HTML reports that hook into continuous integration.
• A mobile application for Spectrum Health that helps patients manage their information and find physicians on their iPhone, Android phone, or Blackberry device.
• A Rails application that generates burndown charts covering various metrics pulled from TestTrack Pro and DOORS databases.
• A continuous integration analogue for monitoring the status of domains and other expirable resources.