Hello, I’m Michael Neil. I’m currently living in Bakersfield, CA and am self employed. Not many people make it to an about page on a website so I’ll try to make this one worth while. I have been programming pretty much all of my life. I’ve grown up with computers. But, who hasn’t nowadays anyway? I’ve been doing this professionally; that is to say making money, since 2004. I have an Associate of Arts in Art from Bakersfield College (my towns community college) and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Art with a Minor in Marketing from California State University, Bakersfield. I graduated Cum Laude in 2009. My strongest skillset is based on the contents of this site. One of the first languages I learned was JAVA; although I rarely use it anymore, and from there I migrated down to ActionScript, PHP, and JavaScript. Those readers who are familiar, or maybe unfamiliar with these languages may think I didn’t like the structure of JAVA. On the contrary, I love the strict Object Oriented approach to JAVA and I bring that day in and day out to these other languages.
ActionScript 1 and JavaScript are very similar. They both have prototyping, they’re based on ECMA, and there is no real class structure. However, and fortunately, ActionScript 3 has a very JAVA like structure with classes and packages and the ability of self instantiating objects. PHP 5.3+ has been coming much closer to the strictness I love with private methods in classes as well as dozens of other abilities. And, JavaScript is a very fun language which has absolutely no strictness in it if the developer chooses to ignore it. I do not ignore it and often write in psuedo classes or prototypes. Beside these languages I also know a lot about the DOM, html, xml, and xslt as well as css.
Of course, I’d be crazy if I weren’t using any frameworks either. This site is built in WordPress; very little secret there. And, I like to work with Smarty. I’d say I like to work with Magento or Zen-Cart for e-commerce but I’d be exaggerating. Although, I do know both and do use them quite often! My heart lies in the core of the languages and I try to fill a niche of custom work; built from the ground up.
Most frequently I’ve dabbled with mobile frameworks jQTouch, Sencha, and jQuery Touch to build a mobile site. And, with Flash Builder 4 and AS3 I’ve been doing some AIR application deployment and iPhone/iPad ready applications.
If you’ve read this far then you probably know enough about what I’m doing here. Personally I skateboard (infrequently now), brew my own beer, garden, play the bass in a band, and frequent XBox Live.