It takes learning, to make teaching?
It’s been over a year since I last posted about my obsession with learning new technologies and now I’m back!
Shortly after that post I was offered a position as a Flash Developer for RMG Connect/JWT. Having been more of a “jack of all trades” developer at multiple companies, I accepted the opportunity to become a master of something. I can truly say that this decision will likely become the backbone of my career as a developer. So, this post is about my personal and professional progression (alliteration aside). I’ll try to stay away from the infomercial talk as much as possible, but if I throw it in there it’s strictly for motivational purposes.
As I was saying, before being hired I was a “one-off” project gladiator. A little HTML here, a touch of PHP there, a sprinkle of Javascript, a dash of Actionscript, and so on… I would spend most of my time trying to consume knowledge from so many sources that i ended up just running in circles, re-learning only basic information on various languages. For some people this can be exciting, and for awhile it was, but eventually it got frustrating because I never seemed to get a sense of true accomplishment from my work. I’ve always been one to keep moving forward, onto bigger and better things, so to be stuck in this circle wasn’t fun for me.
Nearing the end of that phase I was poking around at some as3, trying to get a good feel for all things Object Oriented. I bought a bunch of books on OOP and was beginning to take on my own interpretation of it. [ENTER Brian Lewis] So I get a phone interview with the Senior Multimedia Developer at RMG Connect [Brian Lewis] and by dumb luck he wants me to join the team as a Flash Developer. Granted I’ve been around Flash since my high school years (save your jokes please, Half Asian == Looks 15 == Human Calculator), I was still only dabbling with things and managed to make this knucklehead [Brian Lewis] think I was The Golden Child. As it turned out, this Oaf [Brian Lewis], would become my Mentor and a “somewhat decent” friend. In all seriousness (here comes the Bromance), I’ve been lucky to work side by side with him [Brian Lewis], and can attribute most of my development knowledge to him. So if you are lucky enough to find a Mentor, be sure to take them Bow Hunting a lot (inside joke).
Anyway, within one years time I’ve had the opportunity to work on Large-Scale websites/applications and use a multitude of tools, frameworks, etc. To drop some names, here’s a small list:
– FlashDevelop
– FlexBuilder (soon to be FlashBuilder)
– LowRA
– PureMVC (I love me some Pure!!!)
– Flash Remoting
– Services consuming JSON and XML data
For those just starting their careers, I urge you to keep moving forward, stick to it and success will follow. There is plenty to learn, but it can be done. My experience has grown tremendously and it’s only fair that I continue this process by sharing my knowledge with anyone willing to listen. So, I am planning to make a conscious effort by updating this blog with my experiences, tutorials, and advice as I continue down the road ahead.