Caleb Adam Haye

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.