My name is Michael McTiernan. When I was six years old, I started teaching myself BASIC. Twenty years later, an engineer, product strategist, and technologist, specializing in PHP, Redis, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and Python. I continue to approach programming with the same passionate curiousity I had when I was a child — I am constantly educating myself. Currently, I'm learning more about Agile development methodologies and effective start-up strategies.
Function(x) is the brain-child of Robert F.X. Sillerman; an aggressively ambitious sandbox across entertainment, tech, and media industries.
In January 2012, Function(x) acquired Loyalize to offer alongside its inaugural product, Viggle. Since then, I helped develop solutions to power Fango, one of the most popular iOS apps in Australia as well as real-time gaming experiences for the Grammys, NBA All-Star Game, Oscars, and Daytona 500.
Loyalize is an audience participation company that provides white-label services for brands and content providers to engage nationwide audiences during live TV shows, sporting events, and political debates.
Loyalize grew organically out of sandboxing various features at Trusted Opinion. We realized that many of the fun and exciting features we were developing would really stand the best chance of flourishing on a much grander scale. Loyalize is essentially a massive scale social loyalty platform primarily occupying the Social TV space. It's been a total blast to work on this project, as it requires a lot of unconventional thinking and solutions.
I was primarily in charge of architecting and engineering the platform's REST API using Python, Tornado, PHP, Apache, nginx, Redis, and Elastic Search.
Trusted Opinion is a social recommendation engine — a social network that provides users with recommendations from their friends and experts that they trust.
I was hired in August 2009 as part of their new American team, tasked with rebuilding the primarily Java-based web-site with PHP, Memcache, and MySQL. After a successful relaunch and high-fives all around, I focused on providing ideas and strategy for new features as well as enhancements and modifications for existing ones.
Percepticon provides clients with forward-thinking consulting, strategy, technology and design services.
My work at Percepticon mainly focused on organizing and deploying custom-made web applications for companies such as Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Babcock & Brown, and Bedrock using Corespin, Percepticon's enterprise technology platform.
Shocking! I'm an actor! Bet you weren't expecting that one! Although one might think that my education in acting is irrelevant to my abilities as a programmer, I think my experience at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts has given me valuable tools that I use on a daily basis. The Academy taught me to be fearless and to follow new ideas through to the very end. My teachers urged me to trust my curiousity and intuition and to communicate without pretense or restriction. Also, I learned how to sing. Kinda. Don't ask me to sing, though, because I won't.
Maybe if you paid me. Then I might sing.