My name is Michael McTiernan. When I was six years old, I started
teaching myself BASIC. Twenty years later, I'm a senior software engineer
for Loyalize, specializing in
PHP, Redis, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and SQL. I continue to approach
programming with the same passionate curiousity I did when I was a
child — I am constantly educating myself. Currently, I'm learning
more about Erlang and C, as well as Redis.
Loyalize is an audience participation company. We provide 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 a total blast to work on this project,
as it requires a lot of unconventional thinking and solutions.
I am primarily in charge of engineering the platform's REST API using 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.