Josh Tynjala

Current

Founder and CEO at Bowler Hat Games
Senior Flash Platform Consultant at Self Employed

Past

Director of R&D at Esria
Software Engineer, Flash Platform at Yahoo!
Software Development Engineer at Business Objects

Contributing Author, Flash and Flex Examples at IFBIN Networks
Junior Flash Developer at 50 Below

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Education

University of Wisconsin-Superior

Recommended

5 people have recommended Josh

Connections

70 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Bowler Hat Games

Josh Tynjala’s Summary

With over five years experience developing products targeting Flash Player, Josh Tynjala offers a wealth of knowledge gained from working with many technologies in Adobe's Flash Platform. His experience includes the development of customer-facing rich Internet applications, integration of Flash Platform technologies with native OS applications, the development of two separate charting/graphing frameworks, along with the design and development of many other reusable UI controls and data visualization components for Flash and Flex.

Currently, Josh provides consulting services targeting both Flex and general Flash development needs. Additionally, he recently founded Bowler Hat Games, an indie game company.

Josh Tynjala’s Specialties:

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Flash, Flex, ActionScript 3, Adobe technologies, custom components, data visualization and charting, HTML/JS/CSS, web standards, open source software

Josh Tynjala’s Experience

Founder and CEO

Bowler Hat Games

(Internet industry)

December 2008 — Present (1 year )

Develops casual games for the web and mobile devices.
Senior Flash Platform Consultant

Self Employed

(Internet industry)

October 2008 — Present (1 year 2 months)

Rich Internet Application development services using Adobe technologies including Flash, Flex, and ActionScript.
Director of R&D

Esria

(Computer Software industry)

May 2008 — October 2008 (6 months)

Evaluated new Flash and Flex libraries and frameworks in order to make educated recommendations to fellow developers.

Built proof-of-concept applications that showcased Flash Player's visual strengths while simultaneously exploring developer-centric techniques and best practices.

Built an open source heatmap component and became experienced with the Flex profiler in order to maximize performance with massive data sets.

Extended existing open source libraries to provide useful extensions to fellow developers with active client projects needing fast results.

Worked with clients, including Intuit and Yahoo!, to build user interfaces for Rich Internet Applications.
Software Engineer, Flash Platform

Yahoo!

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)

December 2006 — May 2008 (1 year 6 months)

Developed 19 custom user interface components for the Astra Flash and Flex libraries and many useful classes in the Astra Utilities library. Included full source code, documentation and examples.

Contributed the Charts Control to YUI Library. It became the first module in YUI to leverage the strengths of Adobe Flash Player.

Created and refined an Ant-based build system for all of the team’s projects.

Taught an introductory Flex course to give Yahoo! developers the needed skills to build next generation RIAs.

Interacted heavily in the vibrant Flash community through the Yahoo! Flash Blog, the ydn-flash mailing list, the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center, and throughout other online forums dedicated to Flash and Flex.

Contributed to internal documentation on best practices, recommendations, and standards related to the use of Flash-based technologies.
Software Development Engineer

Business Objects

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; BOBJ; Computer Software industry)

September 2005 — November 2006 (1 year 3 months)

Designed and implemented a Flash charting framework in ActionScript 2 for Crystal Xcelsius. Included over a dozen distinct chart types. Later ported these components to ActionScript 3 with strategic rewrites to follow the Flex component methodology.

Embraced the Crystal Xcelsius “Steal the Show” tagline by enhancing the chart components with immersing animations.

Developed a fully interactive Flex-based “canvas” with drag-and-drop containment of components, selection, and resizing. This canvas included an undo and redo manager, used the Flash Player ExternalInterface API, managed component and skin libraries, and contained many important optimizations to maximize performance for cases when hundreds of components must be displayed simultaneously.

Participated in brainstorming sessions to create new components and to improve the overall user experience of the application.

Built multiple proof-of-concept prototypes to justify feasibility and development time for new features.
Contributing Author, Flash and Flex Examples

IFBIN Networks

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

November 2005 — May 2006 (7 months)

Established by Ted Patrick, this organization of recognized industry professionals aimed to create a world-class collection of well-documented examples for Flash and Flex with full source code.
Junior Flash Developer

50 Below

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

January 2005 — May 2005 (5 months)

Successfully worked both with a team of developers and independently on various Flash-based projects.

Designed and implemented a set of UI components targeted at Flash Player 7 to be used with current and future projects. Met required goals of small file size, high performance, and flexibility.

Potentially set a standard for code library documentation within the Flash team.

Single-handedly implemented the UI for a swimming pool customization application based on a mockup created in Adobe Illustrator.

Additional Information

Josh Tynjala’s Websites:

Bowler Hat Games

Josh Tynjala’s Groups:

Flex Champions, Silicon Valley Flex User Group (Silvafug)

Conference Speaker: 360Flex San Jose (2007), Flex Maniacs (2007), Adobe MAX Chicago (2007), 360Flex Atlanta (2008), and 360Flex San Jose (2008)

Technical Editor: Professional Flex 2 (Wrox) by Rich Tretola, Renaun Erickson, and Simon Barber