BitchWhoCodes has taken the time to avail her presentation files for the world to consume, you can find them on her kick-ass blog at http://www.bitchwhocodes.com/mt/

These slides are actually required reading for all participants in RIA projects, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

What can I say? I love BitchWhoCodes (Stacy Mulcahy)… I anticipate any developer who has lived through some of the scenarios she was mentioning and who saw her presentation at FlashForward would say the same thing. She came off like some sort of super-hero, sent to rescue developers from the bowels of project purgatory.

What she did was step back and look, from the perspective of a developer, at the overall development process typically found at a misguided agency or company. The sad truth is that most companies do not think about how to actually make their employees happy. Companies will bend over backwards to get a “rock star” developer, but then often times expect he or she to be able to pull some sort of coding rabbit out of the magic hat of late-night, over-caffeinated death marches.

Even companies founded by technically astute, so-called “rock star” developers often forget (walk away from?) the magic that gave them the opportunity to be in the position of influence in which they find themselves; the challenge that made them what they are (were?).

My favorite quote of hers was, “Adding more developers to a project doesn’t solve the problem [of poor planning]. Can 9 women give birth to a baby in a month?” …haha

Following is a brief list of my favorite words of wisdom from Stacey:

• “Meaningful innovation is a competitive edge”
• “Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”
• “Constant chaos is not an effective motivator”
• “Schedules have more important purposes than perfection or accuracy”
• “What would MacGyver do?”
• “Just because I know how to do it, doesn’t mean I should be doing it”
• “Deadlines: always closer than they appear”
• “Developers deadlines get shafted when anyone else blows theirs”
• “Anyone is typically a designer”
• “Iterative graphic design can lead to duct tape development”

She was even nice enough to comfort project managers and reassure them that they are in fact very important… what a gal. But she did emphasize the fact that they need to respect the personal lives of the developers they are coordinating.

Preach on sister, preach on!

Two aspiring bloggers have been posting about their journey to Flashforward 2008. If anyone has more info about these two, by all means fill me in so I can update this post.

In the meantime, you can check out their blog at http://mtatff.wordpress.com/

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

w00t! The folks at IDEO are working their magic again, this time in the form of a DIY kit for creating Flash based multi-touch interfaces. That’s right, IDEO-made sorcery is now available to all via the IDEO labs blog at labs.ideo.com, complete with an ActionScript API (on Google Code) … how can one not love that?

Apparently Flash was well suited for the task at hand. According to the team at IDEO, “”Flash proved to be a very nimble way to support this type of exploration”.

You can check out the actual video showcasing the interaction on the IDEO labs blog.

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

Jared Ficklin of Frog Design once again blew up the spot with his exciting real-world and Flash-based auditory experiments. In order to illustrate how sound travels, he showed how air, like sound, is transparent but still moves. Of course, Jared cannot explain any principal of physics without a (potentially dangerous) physical example. So, he rigged up an air rifle created using a plastic trash can, filled it with smoke from a $29 smoke-machine, and shot the smoke in all directions… several times.It may not seem too significant on the surface, but beneath the surface it reveals the obvious joy Jared gains from working with technology that he loves.

In addition to blasting the audience members with smoke, Jared also showed his awesome Ruben’s tube video (which I originally wrote about here). However, this time he managed to bring a safe version (containing little white objects as opposed to fire) and demonstrated that live. In the end however, Jared, not being someone to let something as novel as “danger” stop him from teaching people the wonderful, physical mysteries of the world of sound, unveiled the actual flaming Ruben’s Tube at the Industry Leader dinner @ the SupperClub:

(Big up to KidBombay for the snap)

Jared also covered some major principles of working with audio in Flash, including destructive/constructive interference, the beauty of algorithmic spawning, and of course the transcendent truth that, “Flash loves Neil Diamond” (Apperently Neil Diamond tracks consistently result in good results within the course of Jared’s experimentation)

You can see a video of Jared’s Ruben’s Tube here.

The conference organizers have asked me to live blog from the upcoming FlashForward conference, and I have obliged. So, for those of you who aren’t fortunate enough to actually attend the conference, you can stay up to date with the topics covered in each session by following my blog, the FlashForward blog, and twitter.

If you are one of the fortunate attendees of this year’s FlashForward conference, by all means say hello if you see me

This year, FlashForward is a single track conference, so that means I could potentially cover each and every seminar… I’m not promising that, but I will promise to keep you up to date on the items that are the most interesting (IMHO). I’ll be doing my best to invoke conversations with all of the speakers and many of the attendees, and I’ll be sure to take and publish plenty of notes, including of any interesting URLs or examples for people to try.

If anyone has any idea on how we might make the live blogging from the event more relevant or useful, please let me know ASAP. I’m often too busy writing code to stop and blog, but things are changing soon… in a major way. Stay tuned for updates

This is the fire visualization I referred to in my FlashForward ‘06 post, how awesome is this?

Austin, despite the fact that is centrally located in Texas, one of the most notoriously conservative states, is actually quite a liberal community with a hip, happening night life. East 6th Ave. is populated by upwards of 100 bars and interesting local venues in an area of only a few blocks, and good restaurants are very easy to locate. On top of that, the locals are outgoing, polite, and the Internet industry is thriving there, making Austin a refreshingly fun place to be.

The conference itself was awesome too. I spent time hanging out with some of my favorite people in the industry; people who’s work I have admired for years; people like Branden Hall, Mario Klingemann (a.k.a. Quasimondo), Craig Swann, and Trevor Dodd. It was awesome having a chance to hang out with those guys and discuss whatever interesting subject matter was at hand.

I saw some amazing things there as well. Jared Ficklin from Frog Design did some amazing things with audio visualization. Basically, he took a tube and attached a speaker to one end, and attached a propane canister to the opposite end. He then drilled holes in the tube, turned on and ignited the propane. He then began to play music through the speaker. As a result, you could see the waveform in the actual flame! He then photographed those images and used them in a Flash audio visualization.

Also, Beau Amber of Metaliq showed off some amazing ActionScript 3 projects. Most notable of which was a geo-data visualization in which he plotted a mesh on top of the San Francisco bay area, which represented the wind channels passing through the region. He then simulated wind speed by animating pixels across the wind streams. It was very interesting indeed.

I spent the entire first day at a Flex 2 workshop hosted by Aral Balkan of OSFlash. Flex is definitely a powerful tool. Although without robust skinning capabilities, it is not quite flexible enough to serve a company like Yahoo! as a realistic deployment and development alternative.

Everyone at the conference was really interested in what Yahoo! is doing. I introduced the Yahoo! Developer Network to a lot of developers, many of whom had never heard of it for whatever reason. I was also doing my best to push the public Hack Day, YRB’s Brain Jam, and whatever open Flash positions/internships we have available throughout the company.

My speech itself was well received. The conference room was completely packed, there was standing room only, and no one really left until the end, which I think implies that people were interested. I basically introduced the difference in the approach I had to take in developing the ActionScript 3 version of the Flash Yahoo! Search API as opposed to the ActionScript 2 version. In short, the ActionScript 2 version required me to write several packages of supporting code in order to adhere to sound object oriented programming principles; however, the ActionScript 3 version required exactly none of that. I only had to write the code to accomplish the objective at hand…go figure. I also touched on remoting with AMFPHP and how easy that is to accomplish in ActionScript 3.

All in all, I have to say it was quite fun and interesting, and I think everyone was happy to see Yahoo! taking Flash seriously. It also gave me an opportunity to re-launch caleb.org, so check it out if you have a chance.