Speaking at InsideRIA – Continuous Integration for RIAs
Jun 22nd
I just got accepted to speak at the InsideRIA Conference! The show will be going down August 23 to 24, 2009. It’s looking like it’s going to be a great show, hosted by our colleagues at 360|Conference and O’Reilly. Tickets are cheaper on a first-come, first-serve basis, so buy your tickets ASAP at http://insideria.eventbrite.com to get the best possible price. See you there, and hopefully you will have a chance to make it to my session.
Just for the record, I’m speaking on continuous integration in RIA development architectures 
Live Blogging from FlashForward!
Aug 16th
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 
Now teaching ActionScript at the Academy of Art MFA Program
Feb 4th
Well, it’s official; I am now faculty at the Academy of Art University. More specifically, I’m teaching a group directed study in the Academy of Art San Francisco’s School of Digital Arts + Communications MFA program.
Last Friday, I taught my first ActionScript class to graduate students working their way towards a Master’s degree at the Academy of Art. I must say, I’m very excited about the class of students that I have and the class of projects they are bringing along with them.
The class is diverse, offering a rich variety of projects and cultural perspectives. Yet since it is a group directed study, it is also small and intimate (8 students), a nice quality for any academic environment. All of my students want to learn ActionScript and programming in Flash, and for the most part they are all daunted, or at least put off in some sense, by the prospect of learning ActionScript 3. I look forward to helping them learn to love the joys and rewards of adhering to best practices (most of all, keeping it simple) on the way to developing fun, interactive applications in Flash.
If any Flash superstars or evangelists are planning to be in the Bay Area anytime within the next 14 weeks, and have an interest in stopping by the class to inspire the next generation of Flash developers, by all means drop me a line so that we can plan accordingly.
What it DU? (WebDU report back)
Mar 29th
Recently, I was fortunate enough to speak at WebDU (Web Down Under), “A rock concert for geeks”. WebDU is an Australian based web conference which boasts the highest speaker to attendee ratio of any major RIA/Web 2.0 conference. The conference itself was exceptional. I had the pleasure of speaking alongside some of the most recognized and inspirational personalities in the industry, including Jesse Warden, Mike Chambers, Mike Downey, and Ted Patrick, to name a few of my American counterparts who attended. Of course, I also had an opportunity to meet some awesome Aussie developers. I was most impressed by Scott Barnes, Lachlan Hardy, Collis Ta’eed, the guys from Nectarine, and the entire team from Daemon (whom also happen to be the conference organizers). It was also nice to see and meet Brandy Fortune, the first woman that I’ve ever seen speak at a conference (I’m excluding Lynda Weinman, the woman behind FlashForward because she is in a class of her own ). Brandy gave a great presentation on usability for designers and developers, you can read a great review of it here at flashmagazine.com.
I spoke on using Yahoo! APIs in Flash. I ran through the latest and greatest offerings from the Yahoo! Developer Network, including the recently revamped search SDK , the awesome AS3 additions by Alaric Cole (Alaric, if you have a blog please let me know, I couldn’t find it), and the latest book to make it to press by Yahoo’s Charles Freedman. I also covered security, best practices, and some real-world implementations of using web services. I also made mention of VUVOX, an awesome startup I have been working with for the past few months alongside a slew of other media & web rock stars. I’ll be blogging in greater detail about VUVOX later.
The conference was freakin’ amazing. The food was spectacular, the accommodations were immaculate, and the general vibe of the community was electric. It was fun (re)connecting with familiar (and some not so familiar) faces from Adobe. The guys from Nectarine sort of took me in and we hung out like we’ve known each other for years. Lachlan and I also spent quite a long time just conversing and sharing ideas… what a blast. After the show I hung out with an engineer from Yahoo! AU, which was cool. We conversed on ways to help Yahoo! embrace and harness the power of Flash and related platforms, which hopefully he can succeed in achieving or at least influencing. My flights to and from Sydney also stopped over in Honolulu, so I had to spend a few nights in Waikiki (hey, it’s a tough job … but somebody’s got to do it )
I’ll be posting my WebDU presentation materials and code shortly, and writing the blog posts that my audience demanded soon … so stay tuned. Sorry for dropping off of the blog thing for a while, I was just too busy to have time to think. However, I’m back and better than ever, and look forward to sharing my ideas and humble perspective with the community for a long time to come.
Peace.
Full Sail – A factory for professional talent
Nov 17th
I spent the majority of last week in Orlando evaluating 2 different Bachelor of Science degree program offerings from an interesting school named Full Sail. At present, Full Sail has degrees in Computer Animation, Digital Media, Entertainment Business, Film, Game Design, Recording Arts, and Show Production & Touring. I was invited to evaluate the new degree pertaining to Web Engineering, but also participated in the Digital Arts and Design curriculum evaluation as well.
I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by and entirely impressed with Full Sail. They are working hard to create a unique, energetic environment that supports creativity and encourages participation. The staff, equipment, and curriculum are personalized and professional, with a substantial amount of focus placed on independent development and self-determination. The school has a very distinct mandate, graduating professionals who are capable of hitting the ground running and positively influencing whatever company has the wherewithall to offer them industry positions. Perhaps most impressive is their job placement rate, which amazingly is above 80%!
Full Sail is definitely a viable option for someone looking to learn cutting edge, well rounded skills for today’s media industry … and no, I was not paid to say any of this
FITC Report Back
Oct 13th
Last week I had the opportunity to join Yahoo! Maps’ Charles Freedman in presenting at the Flash in the can festival (FITC). We were presenting at the same time as Joshua Davis, so attendance at our presentation was minimal. However, we had fun talking with the people that managed to show up
Chuck spoke about marketing concept using the Yahoo! Maps Flash API, and I pitched in by talking about some of the things Yahoo! is doing with Flash, including our FLV Video Remixer, Stats tracking applications, Finance Charts, and of course the Yahoo! Developer Network Flash Center which uses Yahoo! APIs from various Yahoo! properties.
I had the chance to hang out with some cool people, like Daniel Dura (it turns out his brother works at Yahoo! too, go figure), the guys from Metaliq, some people from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, and the authors of Red5, a kick-ass open source Flash streaming server.
Honestly, I didn’t get the chance to see any really interesting presentations. I was only there for Thursday, and it was a Thurs-Sat conference, so I missed most of the fun stuff. I wasn’t there for Mario’s, but I heard he rocked. Chuck and I spoke at the same time as Joshua Davis, so I missed his too… but I heard he was great. At any rate, I’m still looking forward to the next one.
On that note … I also spoke to Shawn, the FITC conference organizer about potentially presenting at FITC in the future … so stay tuned
FlashForward Austin ‘06
Sep 18th
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.