About Me

The Basics.

My name is Mitchell Hashimoto and I’m an 18 year old student at the University of Washington. I grew up in Redondo Beach, CA and graduated from South High School in 2007. I played baseball up until my senior year in high school and was a member of student government.

The Nerd In Me.

I started dabbling with computer science when I was 10 years old (6th grade). My friends and I used to play the game Neopets, where you create an identity in a virtual world where you can play games, amass money, battle, and so on. I found that I was repeating the same tasks every day for around two hours to get a measly amount of virtual money. So I began learning Visual Basic, eventually writing my first program: a neopets bot which played the game for me!

Fast forward eight years and I am still deeply involved in computers. On a daily basis, I use PHP and I am actually a Zend Certified Engineer. On that same note, I am the host of the Zend Framework Screencasts. In addition to PHP, I use Objective-C nearly everyday, which is due my recent interest obsession with Mac OS X programming.

My main interest for the past few years, however, has been the art of programming. And no, I don’t mean the books. I have recently spent a majority of my time studying design patterns, good programming style and practices, working with teams, and so on. I am a firm believer in unit testing and the MVC pattern (where it is appropriate), and I believe in open source software. I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am today if it wasn’t for the generosity of open source programmers, and I intend to open source my own work.