My name is Michael Hoskins. I am a 31 year old web developer living in Houston, Texas. I live with my wife Stephanie and our two wonderful children who take up almost all the time I have left over from staring at my monitors all day. I’m a total geek, and it’d be fair to say that I’m pretty well addicted to the computer.

Work

I play around in a broad array of technologies, many of which I actively use at my day job as design manager at US Interactive. My team handles our normal site maintenance, general web development, and courseware production in Adobe Flash.

I primarily handle the Actionscript heavy lifting (writing AS2 and AS3 classes), as well as development of applications for our PHP-based clients, administration of our bug tracking system and MySQL databases. I handle all SEO for our sites.

I freelance on the side when an opportunity presents itself, but am not currently looking for new projects.

Play

I’m into all sorts of games, both electronic and non. I generally favor video games, as I have since my parents bought an Atari 2600 back in the 80s. My dream as a child was to make a living creating video games. I created a couple games at a previous job, experienced crunch time, found out that crunch time is standard for game developers. I no longer want to make a living creating video games.

Much of my spare time these days is dedicated to building a comics hosting platform for other webcomic creators. My friend, Rodney, hosts a couple of his comics on this site and I’ve been using his feedback to develop an administration system for new webcomic creators. When this framework is nearing completion, I will open up hosting to the public.

Programming

I tend to favor open source products and languages, but not from any particular ideology about closed versus open source. I use Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0 as a matter of course, and is my standard go-to language for Rich Internet Apps.

My favored web development language is PHP. I considered learning Ruby after hearing a fellow designer gush about it, but what I suspected about its performance versus its “code elegance” proved correct once I heard people whining about performance problems. I’ve found that with well-written custom classes, short initialization can make up for a perceived lack of code elegance in PHP.

I’ve done a fair bit of classic ASP development, and a few Windows scripts using VBScript. I found Python to be a far more robust language for local scripting. I have a familiarity with ASP.Net and Master Pages, but despite liking the C# language itself, can’t get past ASP.Net’s development paradigm of using postbacks for everything.

I’ve used a few Javascript libraries for web development. I like mootools, but since we’ve adopted jQuery at work, I’ve fallen into using jQuery more and more.

Miscellaneous Interests

I always love making pretty pictures, and to that end I’ve learned quite a few software packages. The ones I’m primarily interested in are anything in the Adobe suite of products, and 3ds max.