About Mike

Mike ZirayI love teaching and mentoring students who want to be more than just developers whether it’s in mobile, web or game development, pulling from my 20 years of development experience.

I was soloing airplanes before I ever drove a car. That intense studying, starting when I was 15, began a lifelong habit of learning and purposeful practice. I’m always trying to improve, always sharing what I’ve learned and always working towards something interesting. Since then, I’ve trained as a rescue diver, hold a professional scuba diver certification, I’m a rock climber (leading 5.10b), construction worker (we built up our house from studs), and university professor.

I love building large software solutions (back end, front end, Android and iOS) and have designed, engineered and built over 40 mobile apps for iOS and Android. I create 3D models, architectural visualizations, animations, 3D games and data visualizations because it allows me to create whatever I can dream up.

I share my knowledge by teaching mobile and game development courses, producing tutorials on YouTube and mentoring software developers. It’s improved my communication, leadership and teamwork skills.

I enjoy learning Spanish, German, Hungarian and I read and I travel as much as I can.

I moved to Boise, ID a number of years ago because my wife was offered a great engineering job and the tech community here is great. We moved from Blacksburg, Virginia, home of Virginia Tech. I have also lived in Budapest, Hungary and in a small town in New Jersey.

Trying to Fit Life into a Lifetime

So, hopefully you find something useful in these pages. So, that’s just a little bit about me. If you’re more curious than that, you know how to contact me!

Check out the previous posts to get a better idea of what I do!

Professional

I’ve been personally involved with the development of about 40 mobile apps and games, either personally developing them, managing a small team or consulting on larger projects. I’ve been part of enterprise level projects but still try to find time to volunteer on small projects as well and help build start ups.

Programming Languages:
– C & C++ (1996)
– Objective-C (2003)
– C# (2007)
– Swift (2014)
– Java (2002)
– PHP (2002)
– MySQL (2002)
– JavaScript
– Lua
– ActionScript 2/3

Markup/Other:
– XML (SOAP, data store)
– JSON (ReST web services) HATEOAS
– HTML

Frameworks, Platforms, Applications and SDKs:
– Cocoa & Cocoa Touch (Mac and iOS Development)
– Unity 3D (CGW: Power of Nature mobile game)
– Unreal Engine 4 (Our Great War)
– Blender (Game asset creation, scenes, video)
– Corona SDK (Lua) (Crystal Geyser Water mobile game)
– Android SDK
– NodeJS
– SailsJS
– Swagger
– QUnit, Jasmine, Karma (Enterprise level front end testing)
– Backbone (Enterprise level front end development)
– AngularJS (Enterprise level front end development)
– ASP .NET (Content management system for Hasbro)
– Drupal (Various websites and web stores)
– WordPress

Specialties:
– Mobile application development (iOS and Android)
– Game development for story telling and marketing
– Human Computer Interaction (HCI & UX)
– Test driven development
– Localization/Translation
– Client management
– Business management (Finance, Legal, Branding, Marketing)
– Project Management