Michael Hradek

At Zumobi I developed the official Sporting News NBA, Parenting Ages & Stages, MSN Money Smart Spend, and Meet the Press Android applications. Rapid application development, cross platform, vast integration; it has been an amazing experience. And as a bonus, thousands of users get to hopefully enjoy the fruits of my work!

We have this great idea of quickly replicating free apps serving ads. The pilot of this was iHeartCelebs. Since then we've released 5 more apps: Gadgetopia, DSGN, and others. I architected and implemented a packaging system making creating this sort of app very fast for us. Potentially hundreds of apps with little code change delivering to users neatly packaged news and updates about what they want.

Flicka is my passion to learn and implement an awesome Android application. It brings Flickr to the mobile platform utilizing the Android SDK in creative ways. Working with an enthusiastic designer, the front end looks as good as the code underneath! That's why I co-founded MokaSocial.

While at DomainTools I led a team of five or so developers transforming the codebase, an AJAX heavy web application, on several fronts. Documentation, unit testing, Agile, design – these are a few of the directions I pushed the development team. A majority of the work was on the backend transforming the billing and inventory systems from a units based system to a system of SKUs and packages recursive in nature. Also we rebuilt the entire site to a new UI/UX specification.

The Xunlai Tournament House was a large project which involved tying game login to the website at the Guild Wars website.

It was a very involved project using sockets to communicating with authentication servers to login, table-less layouts, and was available in several languages using XML language files. I had to coordinate with several teams and the NOC to make sure deployment and the site's operation went smoothly.

The Xunlai Tournament House had quite a few newer layout features such as CSS/JS dialog boxes, YUI based drag and drop spanning multiple pages, JS resorting in the target area, and tabbed sections – to name a few things. All this was fully cross browser compatible.

The back end required several checks to ensure tight security in voting and the login in mechanisms. After the tournament was completed, a script would collate and then deliver the winners and their points to the server team. Winning points in this web feature meant users could be awarded items in game which made this a very popular application for our users.

The Official Guild Wars Guild Ladder uses AJAX to update pagination and sorting. Clicking on a guild will reveal statistics and graphs created (GD library) from data points from all the entries for that particular guild for the season.

The Official Guildwars Challenge Mission Ladder was a project that involved interfacing with several teams. I needed server developers to provide the right data to the MySQL tables on an hourly basis. I needed designers to help decide how they wanted the info displayed. I needed the internationalization team to help translate the content into 9 languages. There were a lot of moving parts for me to track.

The ladder features AJAX driven updates pulling information on the fly from a database, aggregating and calculating averages and then caching them in a memory table.

The ArenaNet company website started as a chunky design that was hard to update. Working with a designers and artists, we created a site that changed our online presence to a modernized look and feel.

My contributions were primarily in converting all the content to utilize the Expression Engine content management system. Some aspects were simple straight ports of pages into the CMS. Other aspects involved understanding how the system paginated articles, created breadcrumbs, and so on.