During my first two years of college I majored in astronomy, and physics. But most of my classes were in mathematics and I determined that I liked them a much more than anything else. Then I dropped out of college for a while to work at the US Space Academy in Huntsville, AL. When I went back to school it was only as a mathematics major.

One thing led to another and I ended up with philosophy and history – after taking a short break to get a degree in massage therapy. So it seems that I majored in just about everything I was interested in other than computer science.

In many ways I’m very glad that I didn’t do CS. Because I learned a great deal in my philosophy classes that I would really miss today. And as it turns out I spent a lot of time playing around with HTML/CSS/Javascript and Photoshop. So my time in college was well spent.

These days when someone asks me for advise on becoming a software developer I tell them to pick up a few books and work on some projects that might interest them. A formal education is great but it’s expensive and time consuming. I think a person can learn much faster on their own. And if they don’t have what it takes to be self taught in this field then they probably don’t want to be in it in the first place.

How about you? What was your experience with school and getting into software development?

User poll : Did you get a CS degree or something in the Liberal Arts? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on October 3, 2009.

The blogosphere and Twitterverse is all abuzz with news that Adobe has changed the name of Flex Builder 4 to Flash Builder 4 – at least the important parts of the blogosphere/Twitterverse. :) What do you think about the change?

I’m all in favor with the name change because it clears up the confusion between the SDK and the authoring tool. I think they were correct in naming it Flex Builder when it initially came out so as to avoid a little of the vitriol that many existing developers – namely the Java crowd – had for all things Flash. Now that Flex is firmly established as the leading platform for developing RIAs and is differentiated from the typical Flash skip intro brand it’s time to give it a name that is more suitable to what it is.

While were at it
Lee Brimelow suggested the idea that the Flash Authoring Tool, aka Flash IDE, aka Flash CS2/3/4… could use a name change itself and suggested Flash Designer. Personally I love the idea but what do you think?

Personal title change
All of this name changing has gotten me to thinking that I should no longer call myself a Flash Platform Developer. Because it’s really not true. That name connotes a person who is serious and professional of which I’m neither. I’m more of a Flash Platform Slacker. I just like to play around with pretty things. Learn more about the platform and maybe every now and then accidentally make something useful.

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User Poll : The Eclipse Plugin previously known as ‘Flex Builder’ originally appeared on polyGeek.com on May 16, 2009.

If you’re a Flash Platform Developer/Designer – and why else would you be on this site – then what US city would you most want to live in?

What are the criteria to judge by? You decide. For me I’d consider things like the tech industry in the area – duh, weather, universities, local environment – like mountains, ocean, etc. I don’t have kids but most would need to consider the local education system, which is probably a crap shoot anywhere.

As for the local Flash User Group communities you’d have to think the San Francisco, San Jose area are probably hard to beat. They must get some pretty decent speakers in there from time to time. Plus, I hear Sim Bateman puts on a good show up in Portland. The LA Flash and Flex User Groups are good but too far away for me to visit with any regularity.

What I wanted to show in the chart above is the density of visitors to my blog – which I assume is a general representation of Flash Platform dev/designers. While California has the most visits Mass. has the highest density. I call it the KP-effect. :)

I would have broken this down by city but Google Analytics breaks cities up in odd ways. In a place like Dallas you have one big city. But Los Angeles is broken up into lots and lots of cities.

Here are a few links to some discussions about tech cities:

• eWeek : Beyond the Valley: 10 Blooming U.S. Cities for Tech – page 2
• Wired : 10 Top Tech Towns
• Slashdot : Discussion on the Wired article – I love the comment, “Austin is great but it’s surrounded by Texas.”

I voted for the Northern Virginia area. Richmond is a nice city, I’m pretty liberal. Okay, I’m ultra liberal, and according to those who’s opinions I disfavor the most – Sara Palin – Northern Virginia isn’t even real America anymore. Sounds like my kind’a place. :) Plus Richmond has a low cost of living and a very nice University. My dream location would be to live in a nice neighborhood close enough to a University that I could walk/bike to classes.

I’ve lived in lots of places so here’s my thoughts on a few just off the top of my head:

• Los Angeles – pros: good FUG community, lots of stuff to do, everything except the beach is a longish drive away. In fact, everything in LA is a long way from everything else in LA. No matter what you want to do it always seems like it’s 3 freeways away. The weather is very good. cons: I covered the space already, if you live inland then the summers are horrible.
• San Diego – pros: it really isn’t that big of a city. Traffic isn’t nearly as bad as LA. Good mountains nearby to retreat to. Beach. cons: fires.
• Portland – pros: great FUG community, Sim Bateman, nice clean city, universities. cons: very short winter days, rain, bad traffic.
• Seattle – Similar to Portland without the FUG community. pros: Ryan Stewart, great places to hike and explore when the weather isn’t shit. cons: weather is shit a lot, traffic that would put  Saint Francis of Assisi in a puppy-kicking mood.
• Phoenix – pros: lots of hiking in the area plus N. AZ is at 7,000 feet which is a good get away during the summer. cons: When they close the airport because it’s too hot then it’s really frakking hot and that happens, traffic isn’t that bad for such a big city but it’s very large area. You don’t want to live too far from work there or you’ll regret it.
• New York – “They say if you can live in New York you can live anywhere. So if you can live anywhere why would you live in New York?” – unknown. Observation: I get lots of hits from the NY area so why don’t I know of any developers there? Do they just not talk to anyone outside of NY? Anyone else notice that?
• Orlando – pros: Not bad in the winter, lots of beach stuff to do, I hear the housing market is about to go under so you might be able to squat in a house for free. cons: Not sure which is worse, Phoenix summers or Orlando summers, there are ZERO mountains.
• Raleigh-Durham – pros: nice weather, lots of universities, plenty of places to eat out, decent outdoor opportunities. cons: the cities are liberal and mixed diversity but the state is still very Red.

What do you think?

What’s the best city in the US to be a Flash Platform Developer/Designer? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on November 26, 2008.

Lets see who is going to win the crucial Adobe Flex/AIR/Actionscript demographic in the upcoming election. Neither McCain or Obama have had much to say on the topics that matter to us most. I’ll try to take their stance on common issues and see how they might apply to us as developers. And I’ll try to be as unbiased as possible – which is admittedly isn’t very. :-)
You don’t have to be an American citizen in order to vote!

Open Source
Senator Obama clearly is the better candidate to help promote the Open Source community. Open Source is by it’s very nature socialist, even communistic, in nature. Democrats are about sharing for the benefit of all.

The Republican platform has traditionally promoted closed, proprietary, systems, of development. Take for instance Christianity, which is the cornerstone of the Republican far-right way of thinking, it started as an open source project but then a bunch of guys got together and stated that it was actually the word of God and would thereafter be closed to input and only the upper management would be allowed to interpret the code. The fact that religions much older than Christianity have resurrections, floods, messiahs, etc. is pretty much ignored.

On this issue the Republicans have a very poor record. They steal from open source projects without admitting so. And then they turn around and say it was their idea first all along.

Code revisions and refactoring
Obama has repeatedly stated that you take your best ideas and try and make them better. And if something doesn’t work then try something else. That’s pretty much how we all write code.

Republicans however are pretty much committed to their ideas, regardless of their effectiveness. And their stance on abortion worries me that they might carry the same ideas over to code. Can you image what it would be like if you weren’t allowed to refactor or edit your code once you committed it to the repository?

The good news is that once your application reaches version 1.0 you’re free to shoot it in the head or lock it up in a cell forever if it misbehaves.

Extends
Republicans somehow have this notion that a group of stem cells, that in no way could be induced to form a human embryo, are somehow precious and should be protected from research. Not that they mind performing horrendous experiments on actual living animals for the benefit of the cosmetics industry. That makes me think that they might attempt to pass legislation forbidding the extension of base classes – such as mx.core. Because what is a base class? By itself it isn’t capable of much of anything. But extend it and combine it with other classes and you get amazing applications.

Virus protection
Republican’s do a much better job of playing on fear than the Democrats do. To that end they are viewed as being much stronger on defense. Therefor McCain would likely promote much stronger virus protection for us. However, the virus protection under a Republican administration would suck up a great deal of resources making it more difficult to actually get anything productive done.

On the other hand Obama has said that he would be willing to engage countries like Iran in diplomatic discussions in the hopes of avoiding a conflict that would get our soldiers killed and suck up more resources. Maybe he would also be willing to talk to the people who write viruses in the hopes of reducing the number that we have to protect against.

Taxes
I’m not sure how either candidates stance on taxes could be interpreted as a related issue for a developer. If you have any ideas please comment below.

Comments?
This is all for fun and games. It’s pretty obvious who I’m hoping will win. Agree or disagree in the comments below but keep it clean. I’ll delete anything that is nasty. I can tolerate anything except intolerance. Well, that and country music. Otherwise I’m a pretty tolerant person, most of the time.

User Poll : who’s going to win the Flex/AIR/Actionscript 3 demographic originally appeared on polyGeek.com on November 1, 2008.

Love them or hate them Flex frameworks are all the rave. So what’s your Flex framework of choice, for now?

Andy Powell has an unbiased post about choosing amongst the various Flex frameworks. I think his advice is spot on.

As for myself: I’m still recovering from a bad experience with Cairngorm. ( You know the saying, “Once bitten… twice shy.”) So frameworks aren’t really my bag. Plus, as a freelancer I’m the sole developer on almost every project I work on. One of the benefits – I’m told – of frameworks is to make it easier for teams to work on a project which doesn’t apply to me.

An experienced developer once told me that a framework is just a collection of design patterns. That much seems to be true. As my programming skills evolve so does my toolkit of design patterns that I seem to apply to each project. So I guess I’m rolling my own, very slowly.

Laura and Nahuel from ASFusion.com gave a presentation at 360Flex about their Mate framework. I learned a ton about how to evolve my own framework from them and will probably watch their presentation over and over until I get it. If frameworks are anything of a mystery to you then I’d recommend you watch it as well because they show how seasoned developers approach a project.

Please comment below if you have any advise to share or just want to plug your framework of choice.

What’s your Flex framework of choice? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on August 26, 2008.

Frak, did I slip and call it Silverfish again? My bad. :-)

Disclaimer: The owners of this blog would like to take full responsibility for the total disrespect that the author of this post has for anything that has to do with Microsoft. Except for XBox which is pretty frakking cool and Windows XP which doesn’t totally suck.

Poll at Mashable.com about Silverlight’s Olympic video monopoly originally appeared on polyGeek.com on August 9, 2008.

I was going to have some lame poll about Science Fiction movies but John Wilker – jokingly – suggested that I poll to see where the next international 360Flex conference should be held. Vote over in the sidebar ->>>

NOTE: If you don’t have a vested interest in the poll – like if you live in the US – but you want to see the results then vote for Other.

The country choices are in order of visitors/month to polyGeek.com. Go ahead and comment if you have other suggestions. You might even want to suggest cities within your country of choice. I’m going to sell the results to Tom & John to pay for my next 360Flex conference. Oh, wait, it’s all public. Damn, foiled again! :-)

Where should the next international 360Flex conference be held? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on July 25, 2008.

There are many great reasons to go to 360Flex. I can hardly cover them in this poll here, which isn’t really a serious poll anyway. But if I had to say what the best reason is for going to 360Flex I’d say it’s the amazing lineup of session topics/speakers. There are so many must see sessions that many of them overlap. I’ve even talked to some of the speakers who said that they would skip their own session to go see another one at the same time, if they could.

Here are my must see sessions:

• Ben Clinkinbeard – Strategies for Creating Reusable Components
• Jacob Wright – Advanced ActionScript APIs
• Jeff Houser – How to Build Flex Components
• Josh Tynjala – Polishing Components for the Masses or Mike Potter – Promoting your Flex and AIR applications
• Ben Stucki – How to build a Framework
• Jim Cheng – Advanced Analytics for Flex and Flash RIAs
• Tony Hillerson/Juan Sanchez – See the Data, Be the Data
• Jun Heider – Using the Flex Builder 3 Profiler

There are lots of sessions that cover Flex and name your AMF backend integration. Fortunately I’m pretty much engaged to AMFPHP for database integration so I’ll probably blow off all the BlazeDS/ColdFusion/RubyAMF sessions, probably.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there. And don’t forget to ask me about RunPee.com. I’ll be giving out beta invites.

Poll: What’s the best thing about 360Flex conferences? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on July 21, 2008.

What do you think will happen?
See poll in right-sidebar –>

Links: FAQs, stunning photos, and why it won’t destroy the Earth – I hope they’re right.

And Wired magazine has some nice charts on the data it, and other experiments, gather.

Poll: What will be the outcome of the Large Hadron Collider? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on July 6, 2008.

What would you do without Facebook? Or, twitter, LinkedIn, etc.? Well, suppose you could use only one of them. Which would it be? ( vote over in the right sidebar )

There’s a good argument to be made for FriendFeed since it aggregates many of the most popular social sites. But it pretty much just gives you a snapshot of each so maybe it wouldn’t be the best option.

My choice would be twitter because I work from home and it’s pretty much all I have to replace water-cooler talk.

But my RSS reader – Google Reader – would be a close second. It’s not just a way for me to keep up with the latest news in the Adobe Flex/Actionscript world. It’s also a great way to keep tabs of my friends who blog.

Why don’t you vote and then comment your thoughts below?

Poll : If you could only use one of your social networks which would it be? originally appeared on polyGeek.com on July 2, 2008.