Taking a look at everyone’s “2009 In Review” blog posts is really great inspiration. Looking back over the last year is always worth taking a minute to do. It’s great to reflect on personal growth over the course of a year and take note of our accomplishments. I decided to recall the last year for myself and put together a quick blog post. It was a pretty good year and I’ve learned a lot and continued refining my skills in my mission to become a “great” Flex developer. Here’s a rundown of what 2009 looked like for me:
San Diego Flash Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation
To start 2009 off I gave my first presentation to an awesome group of Flash and Flex developers in San Diego. The presentation was created from the two articles I wrote in 2008 for the Adobe Developer Connection on Best Practices for Flex development. I’ve kept the Powerpoint presentation offline until now. Some of the content is a little dated but it’s probably still worth checking out. I may update this presentation with everything I’ve learned over the last year and for the upcoming changes coming in Flex 4, if time permits.
Download the Flex Best Practices Powerpoint Presentation here.
Java Programming II at UCSD
After wanting to learn more about Java for many years I decided to go back to school and take a structured class. This was the first time I’d set foot in a classroom since about 1998. It was through the UCSD Extension program but classes were held on the UCSD campus. It was pretty cool to walk around the campus and see the “college” life again after so long. In addition this was the first time I’d ever taken a class at a University, my previous college experience was at a community college. The instructor Kent Yang was really awesome and the class was killer! I learned a lot more about Java, OOP, Unit Testing and Design Patterns. This knowledge was all transferable into AS3/Flex so the experience was well worth the time and investment.
Check out the class details here.
The Flex Show Episode 71: OOP w/ Sean Moore
The Flex Show is awesome, simply stated. Jeffry Houser has done an excellent job with the podcast and I’ve been a fan for a few years now. One of my goals was to be a guest on The Flex Show and in 2009 in became a reality. I was able to put together a talk about OOP in regards to Flex and ActionScript development. The Java class helped solidify my knowledge of OOP so hopefully the talk will help others grasp some of the fundamental OO concepts. It was an honor to be on the show and I really appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully I can do another show sometime in the future. Maybe on the Mindset BCI work I’ve been doing lately.
You can listen to my talk on The Flex Show here.
Orange County Flex Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation
Laura Arguello was kind enough to invite me to give my Flex Best Practices preso at the OCFlex Users Group in March. This gave me a chance to visit the ASFusion office before the preso and hang out with Jeremy Saenz (aka The Flex Gangster) a bit as well. The crowd at OCFlex was really great and very patient as I got set up and had some trouble finding a room at the venue big enough for everyone. Thanks again to ASFusion and the OCFlex Users Group for inviting me to present. It was a great experience!
Technical Authoring for O’Reilly InsideRIA
2008 was a big year for me and authoring. I wrote articles for Adobe, Flash Magazine and O’Reilly’s InsideRIA. I continued the trend in 2009 by writing three featured articles for InsideRIA. Rich Tretola is one of the coolest guys I know and such a pleasure to work with. He helped me a ton with the articles I wrote this year through the good and the bad. Another person I really have to thank is Matt Chotin. His feedback on my Flex 4 article was a huge help and I really appreciate his time and input! You can check out the articles I wrote for InsideRIA below:
Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices
Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo)
Decorator Design Pattern
Technical Reviews for Manning Publications
Reviewing books is great for a lot of reasons, it helps your writing skills, you get a preview of the books before they’re published and you get to contribute to the quality of the books being published. I do the reviews on a volunteer basis and really enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to do so. In 2009 I had the privilege of reviewing three books for Manning. They are all great titles and I encourage you to check them out.
Hello! Flex 4
Flex On Java
Flex 4 In Action
Present.ly AIR Client Development
This is one of the larger apps that I worked on completely by myself. Dave at Intridea got in touch with a request to help them refactor an existing AIR application to best practices. This project was one of the best projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. The app was cool, the concept was cool and the client was cool. The Present.ly service is a private Twitter like service for businesses, if you haven’t already taken a minute to check it out I encourage you to do so. Another really awesome aspect of this project is that the codebase for the AIR app is totally open source and available for download on GIT Hub. I was able to use Cairngorm and Flex Unit on this project which I feel really helped the codebase and application’s stability and scalability. You can check out the codebase and the finished app by following the links below:
Present.ly AIR source code at GIT Hub
Present.ly AIR Client
Game Consulting and Development
A game development company contacted me for some assistence with consulting and development for a Flex and Flash based game. This was my first experience doing any game dev and it was really great. This was another awesome client. They are not public yet so there aren’t any links to share. I did want to note that game development is something that I’d like to do more of and hopefully 2010 will present more opportunities to do so.
Parsley
Learning Parsley was been on my radar for quite some time. I’ve been able to work with the framework quite a bit over the last few months and really like it so far. It’s quite a bit different than Cairngorm development but it offers more flexibility and is the preferred direction by many developers. IoC frameworks are all the rage and I am glad to be learning how to use them.
Presentation Model
This design pattern is great. It enables better unit testing for your applications and helps to decouple logic from views. Using the Presentation Model wasn’t totally clear at first but after working with it for a while I’m really beginning to like it. Having a bunch of code in MXML files wasn’t really ever all that appealing to me and using the Presentation Model really helps to separate this code out into pure AS3 classes.
ThinkGear Brain Computer Interface API
In an effort to end 2009 with a bang I released my ThinkGear API. This API enables the Neurosky Mindset Brain Computer Interface to communicate with AS3 based applications. So far I’ve been able to build a rough dashboard that uses my brainwaves as its data source. In addition I was able to tie my brainwaves into some AS3 based particle visualizations. You can see my demo video and learn more here. Control ActionScript with your mind!!!
Well here’s looking to 2010. I can’t believe it’s already been a decade since Y2K. It’s been a great decade for the Flash Platform we’ve all come a long way.
FlashScope is a brand new online marketplace to buy and sell flash components. They have flash files of any type and any sophistication you may need. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be helping FlashScope with a product giveaway. I’m going to ask Flash/Flex/AIR/AS3 questions on twitter and the first person to email me with the correct answer will win! Sounds fun!
I’ll be presenting at the Denver Flex User’s Group on July 15th on RobotLegs. In addition I should also be presenting via Adobe Connect for the Nashville Flash Platform User Group in May. Here is some additional information about the presentation.
I’d like to thank Tom at 360 Flex for the opportunity to open up this morning at 360 Flex by providing some early morning tunes for the crowd. I was spinning a live set from my office across the web. The set was shown for the crowd on the big screens, you can see the action in the photo in this post. Per request I played old school Hip Hop, mostly from the 80s. Tracks like: The Message, Rappers Delight, Peter Piper, La-Di-Da-Di, The Show, Boyz n the Hood, etc. It was a huge honor and I really can’t thank the crew at 360 enough for the opportunity. I should be spinning another live set on Wednesday morning, via the web for the 360 Flex attendees. In addition there is a rumor that I may be spinning at Flash and the City, still working out the details on that…
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