In case you didn’t know my wife and I have been living in a a recreational vehicle for the past year or so. A few people have expressed interest in seeing what it’s like so I thought I’d film a short video – 3:30 minutes.

We named our RV Serenity after the ship in Firefly. I really enjoy living in here. It really simplifies my life: no commute, decent standard of living, very little house work, etc. I’d say the biggest challenge is getting good access to WiFi all the time. But that is getting better all the time.

On the up side I think we spend around $1,500/year to stay in very nice RV parks. This Summer we plan on driving up the West Coast to Oregon and then back down to SoCal in the Fall for MAX.

Let me know if you have any questions about the rig. I’d be happy to answer them.

By the way, it has to be some sort of record that we have two desktop PCs, two laptops and 6 monitors total in this rig. I wouldn’t have it any other way. :)

Boy the way JesterXL spoke, code that made the hit parade, guys like us we had it made, those were the days, and you know where you were then, frameworks were Cairngorm and Flex were version 2, mister we could use a man like Mike Downey again, didn’t need no transition states everybody wrote his on MVC code, gee our old RIA ran great, those were the days!

All the other kids are writing about the first 360Flex conference and I didn’t want to be left out. :) First, lets put some perspective out there about just how long ago this was.

• We were all using the Flex2 framework.
• We thought Flex2 was, for the most part, awesome because it was written in Actionscript 3
• Flex3 beta-bits wouldn’t be available for another 3 months – June 2007
• We were almost a full year away from getting Flex 3 public release – February 25, 2008
• AIR was still called Apollo
• The beta-bits for Apollo weren’t even available yet – March 19, 2007
• A few people were using the Cairngorm framework because it was the only framework around – no, that other one doesn’t count. Nope, not that one either. :)
• Twitter was 9 months old.

On a personal note:

• I was still working for the XBox/Zune team at Microsoft. I think at this point I was prototyping the UX for Zune2.
• It would be almost a full year before Actionscript 3 was my primary language.
• I was still kicking around this idea for a website that would tell people when the best time to run and pee during a movie was. But I didn’t know any MySQL, or PHP. Actually, I didn’t really know how a database even worked or where to start.
• videoMaru was my claim to fame.

I had just barely played around with Flex2 before the conference so I was totally out of my element. Here I was, writing mostly AS2 code in the Flash IDE – ewww, it just makes me shiver to think back on that – and I’m talking to guys that make their own operating systems for fun. But I soaked up everything I could because I could tell that Flex was going to become a major part of my life in the near future. Never would have guessed just how major.

What I got most out of the conference was a sense of perspective about what was out there for me to learn and what it would take to get there and most importantly what I would be able to do once I did learn all this new stuff.

I was the only developer on my team at XBox. And I had only ever met one other Actionscript developer – the guy I replaced at XBox who overlapped with me for about 1 week. Peers are very important for people to grow and explore their knowledge and creativity. And I think for most of us attending the conference there was a feeling of isolation from the Actionscript developer community. That’s not surprising because about the only source that tied us together was the MXMA feed.

It seemed to me that the majority of the people at the conference were completely jazzed to be there. And it was the feeling of community that we were starting to feel that we didn’t want to go away. Fortunately there was this Twitter thing that most of us started using just before or during the conference. So even though we were spread across the globe we could still keep in touch. And that’s what makes going back to 360Flex so great. It’s the closest thing I have to a family reunion.

The highlight of the conference for me was when I was showing a few guys how my videoMaru code worked – if you’re unfamiliar with videoMaru then watch the 90 second video below. So while I’m showing them how it works Eli Greenfield walks up behind me – I had no idea who he was at the time. He watches for a minute and says, “That’s cool. Were working on something like that at Adobe.” I think that turned out to be Catalyst/Flex4. I’m not saying that videoMaru had any influence on them but it was incredibly validating to me that I came up with a solution to a problem that the Flex team was also exploring.

There was one other big development that happened during the conference that helped bring the Flex community together. Adobe hired this guy from Seattle named Ryan Stewart. His work at Adobe as the RIA Evangelist gave us a familiar face to connect with. I think we all knew him so his blog became the primary source of news in the RIA world for us. And if you meet Ryan at a conference then you’ll really come to understand the term social butterfly. This guy knows everyone and I think he probably has a beer with everyone, or at least he’d like to. :)

If you’re on the fence about going to 360Flex in March and especially if you have never been to one before then here’s my pitch to get you there: Being at 360Flex makes it very easy to become a member of the Flex community. Forget all the great sessions. Just hanging out in the hallways and going out late at night at the bar with the other attendees makes it more than worth the time and money it takes to get there. You’ll learn things during the sessions for sure but that’s not the best part. You’ll get back home and feel like you got zapped with 1.21 Gigawatts of creativity. You’re going to add a whole bunch of people to your twitter stream and you’ll probably start blogging a bit more than usual – or start a blog. But you’ll also work harder on those personal projects you’ve been kicking around. So the time and money that goes into getting to 360Flex is chump-change compared to the value you can get out of it. So I’ll see you there, right?

<rant>

I know this is off topic but I just can’t help it. Like everyone else about half of my followers on Twitter are people with obscene numbers of follower/following counts. I just got another one today and it made me think of Jeff Foxworthy’s skit how to tell if you’re a redneck. Because let’s face it, SMDs are the rednecks of the Internet.

• Does your bio contain SEO, or Internet marketer? If so, you might be an SMD.
• Does your Twitter homepage background show piles of money? Yep, you guessed it, you might be an SMD.
• Is your Twitter bio written in all UPPER-CAPS?
• Does your face completely fill your Twitter icon?
• Are you smiling way to much? Then yes, you might be an SMD.
• For the love of Tim Berners-Lee do you not know that the Internet is capitalized? ( Okay, this is debatable but if you don’t understand the debate then, well, you do the math. )
• Do you comment on other people’s blogs even though you have no idea what the post is about just so you can get your name and link to your douchbag homepage out there?
• Do you have random inspirational quotes sprinkled throughout your Twitter-stream?
• And did you sign up for a service to insert those quotes for you? Yep, you’re a SMD.
• Do you tweet about doing cool things even when your sitting at home trimming your nose-hair?
• Do you follow people and then unfollow them a few days later if they don’t follow you back? And then follow them again, rinse-repeat? <- SMD, bigtime!
• Have you signed up for some service that automatically follows people for you to help get your follower count up?
• Have more than 100 people blocked you from following them? You guessed it, you’re an SMD.
• If you’re following me on Twitter and I’m not following you back. Good bet that you have SMD-like qualities.

Help me out. I’m sure there are a whole bunch more that we can add to this list.

</rant>

Picture this, your writing code. Not the everyday code. I’m talking about the really complex stuff. You know, something that involves sin(), a few recursive functions and user events. The sort of thing that has to work just right or it’s going to crash the browser and it has to work lots of different ways. So you really have to think deeply, concentrate, and make sure you get it just right.

Just then your significant other walks in and blurts out some question about something that is light years from being of even the slightest interest to you.

Even though you try and hold your thoughts together your brain falls out of warp drive. You might quickly reach for pen and paper in hopes of jotting down something useful to remind yourself where to pick it back up.  But by now all your thoughts are down the drain. Quickly being replaced by anger and annoyance.

You know they didn’t do it on purpose. You know they can’t tell the difference between when you’re writing insanely complex code that requires the concentration of someone disarming a nuclear bomb or the regular kind of code that requires the mental focus of, say, someone mowing the lawn.

Face it. We look pretty much the same in both cases. So how could someone tell? It would certainly be a lot easier for them if they walked in and saw us sweating bullets while holding wire cutters and kneeling in front of something that looks like it could leave a crater visible from orbit if we screw it up. But no.

So we turn and do our best to get through whatever trivial matter has been brought to our attention. But I’m thinking that the next time, just for fun, I’m going to yell KABOOOOM! at the top of my lungs.

What a difference a decade makes. In the year 2000 AOL was worth about $240 billion. It’s unlikely that you had heard the term WiFi or of a company named Google. A T1 line was considered blazing fast. More than 91% of home Internet connections were done at 56kbs or slower. A top line PC ran at about 600MHz and didn’t have the processing power of today’s smartphone. Apple was a joke. And mobile phones were used to make phone calls and that’s about it. If you watched video on the Internet it was probably through the RealPlayer. And you certainly didn’t watch it in HD because a big monitor was about 1024 x 768 – and it wasn’t an LCD.

There was no Facebook, no MySpace, no Twitter, and no Skype. Hell, there were very few places where you could even comment on someone else’s website. And everything was a website because very few people had heard the term blog before.

Evolution of the Flash Platform
There was no Flash Platform yet. Advanced Actionscript involved making dynamic MovieClips. ( Remember createEmptyMovieClip(). That used to be a big deal. )

We were still a few years away from Macromedia MAX 2003. Which as far as I can tell was the first MAX event. ( Update: there was DevCon and UCON which evolved into MAX. ) I even did a double-take while looking at the MAX 2003 page where it said:

On the web, we’re seeing a shift from inaction to interaction. To fill this need, Macromedia offers the Studio MX 2004 and Flex products to help designers and developers create more interactive web experiences.

Flex is that old? Wow! How far they have come.

The Flash Community
In 2000 the Flash community didn’t extend much beyond the walls of Macromedia. How could it. There were practically no books on the subject and I don’t know of any blogs. Not that it would matter because how would you ever find them? There was no RSS and searching the web was a mess.

Get a job
Very few people had fulltime jobs doing work with Flash. And if you did you were a designer. Even then most of the work involved the dreaded skip intro. Could anyone have guessed what lay ahead?

My guess
If you’d like to see what I do think lies ahead for us in the next decade then read the follow up to this post Predictions for the next decade.