The Back Button

I’ve just gotten around to deciding my session schedule for this years Adobe MAX conference. If I’m missing any must-see sessions from this list, please inform me!

Ever since the release of Flash 5, I’ve more or less been a Flash/ActionScript developer and I love it. I’m able to do just about anything I need to do in Flash. I sometimes like to joke that ActionScript is my first language and English is my second (I think my blog posts are proof lol). It’s taken me from a poor student existence in the UK, to being a moderately well off software engineer living in San Francisco. I owe everything right now to my Flash skills, but something feels off.

The other week, I was reading a blog post by Doug McCune entitled ‘Flex Changed My Life‘, it made me ponder for a little bit (before I remembered I had stuff to finish). To sum up his post; he quit his job seven months ago to become a Flex floater/contractor/consultant/speaker and life’s great for him, best move ever! I also met Aral Balkan at MAX this year who has much of the same life. And I’m sure I could name others, just look at the Adobe evangelist roster!

It all makes me wonder why I’m not doing the stuff those guys are? Why am I not doing the things I want to do with my skills, why am I just a “gun for hire”? To me, traveling to help people with my skills sounds insanely awesome. Maybe those guys can state otherwise (greener grass and all that), but from my cube it looks adventurous to meet new people who want to engage with you about something you love.

I feel like I have so much I to give the world, but here I am working day in, day out on the same project. But don’t get me wrong, working on the same project for months at a time is fine with me, at my previous employment projects were in and out of the door before you could blink.

I am hoping that my starting the SF Flash Platform user group may help with my burning desire to express myself more outside of my everyday work but will it be enough? I just don’t know. It just might make me busier.

Could I become freelance Flash consultant? Sure. But I have too much at stake right now. My rent has just spiked and my wife is unable to work because of her H4 visa status, plus we have no family in the US. But that’s all OK because my job/salary is stable and life is very comfortable at the moment with no worries. Maybe I’m just being too much of a wimp, but if I were a wimp, I don’t think I’d be where I am today at the age I’m at. I don’t know.

So, do I need to move up the ladder? Is being the “gun for hire” just too boring for me now? I do love being creative and coming up with new ideas and solutions, but most of the time, they are all out of my solo reach. So would leading a team be the thing for me? I certainly don’t want to become an Outlook user though.

I do know one thing for certain, I’m slowly becoming tired of being an engineer even though I love it. It’s all very puzzling. But at least I’m able to almost express it in words.

A few weeks ago I received and email from Google recruiting via LinkedIn. It went like this..

Your name came across my desk from a colleague of mine and I wanted to see if you might be interested in exploring opportunities with Google. Although I don’t presume to know what you may or may not be interested in doing, I do know that we have a number of opportunities in many different areas. If you are at all open to that type of conversation, please feel free to email or call me. Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working for Sony, but Google is the place everyone wants to work at least once and I’m a bit of an opportunist. So I briefly called the lady and submitted my full resume. It sounded like I’d been head hunted over thousands of people who submit their resumes everyday to Google. And I quite honestly got a little excited. I’d never submitted my resume to Google in the past as I thought they received too many submissions and so it would be a waste of my time.

Then two weeks later I get this ..

I brought your resume/portfolio to the Flash committee for review and they were impressed with your background and accomplishments. We carefully reviewed your background and experience, and though we do not have a position that is a strong match with your qualifications at this time, we will be keeping your resume active in our system. We will continue to use our database to match your profile with new opportunities and will reach out to you if we find an opening for which you may be qualified. Thanks again for your interest in Google’s careers and unique culture We hope you will remain enthusiastic about our company. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at any time.

So if they didn’t have any ActionScript jobs open, why on earth did they even contact me? The bit that really tickles me is “Thanks again for your interest in Google’s careers and unique culture We hope you will remain enthusiastic about our company”. I almost wrote back telling them to f’ off but I managed to keep my cool for once.

After talking to a co-worker of mine at Sony, it seems that he got the exact same email via LinkedIn, though he didn’t pursue it. So for what ever reason, it seems that Google is fishing on LinkedIn and emailing anyone who has a software engineering background instead of filtering through their thousands of resume submissions which seems slightly odd to me seen as those are the people who really do want to work at Google.

Has anyone else been contact by Google this way and ended up with the same outcome?

I think that this past week and a half has been the most stressful part of my year so far. Why? Well it all started with my landlord calling us to inform that he’s selling our place and that, at the very least, we have a month until we have to move. The first thing that comes to mind is panic! The second thing that comes to mind is more panic because the holidays are coming up and this is the worst time of year to be finding somewhere.

This past two years we’ve been living in Emeryville (around where the road caught on fire and where Ikea and Pixar is located). Emeryville isn’t the best area, but it was very close to where I used to work, thus it seemed like a good idea to move there. Now I work in SOMA (South of Market, San Francisco), it’s a little far away, so we were planning on moving anyway, just in our own time.

After attending around five open houses, I came to realize that the situation was worse than I’d thought. Not only did most of the places suck, but many of them had lots of people bidding on them. Sometimes, contracts would be signed within the first five minutes of an open house. This whole experience was absolutely depressing. And to top it off, I don’t even have a credit history in the states yet (fyi: I’m British) as I don’t own a credit card yet and pay for everything with ATM (yes, I’m stupid, but I thought it was a good thing not to have any debt). So being picked out of large group of people was hard. The only thing I really had going for me was working for Sony.

Insolently, one of my co-workers was also moving. He was moving out of the Marina to buy a place in North Beach. So I asked if he could refer us to his landlord as good people to take over his old place. This all seemed like it would pay off, until we were informed that the rent on the place had gone up from 1700 to 2100 bucks!!! Crazy huh!?!

Just when it seemed that we were going nowhere, the building manager from the building in the Marina called. He informed us that there was another unit that had become available and as we had been previously refereed, our application would be bumped to the top of the pile if we were to apply. The only road block now was the units owner appreciating my status and lack of credit history.

So finally today, I get a call informing me that we have been approved and that we can move in soon. WOOOOOOO!!!!

MAX Photos

Chicago Photos - Part 1

Chicago Photos - Part 2

FYI .. Everyone should take a Segway tour!

I’ve done it! Ive broken into the world of Flash blogging :).

One on my goals for 2007 was to start a blog, but I never did have the time to build what I’d visioned. I wanted to build my own custom Rails CMS and then front it in glorious ActionScript, but alas I never did have the spare time and motivation happen together. So for now, I’ve defaulted to WordPress and borrowed this basic theme. I’m sure though as the weeks and months progress, this shall start to change (well, I hope).

So, what can you expect from this new blog? Well, let me start by giving a brief overview of my background. I am proficient in most areas of Flash, I have been using Flash since Flash 4 and today my strongest area of Flash is AS3 and my weakest is the Flex Framework. (Don’t get me wrong, I know the basics and methodologies of Flex, I just haven’t found a reason for using it yet.)

I used work for a company called Sparkart (based in Emeryville, CA) where I created Flash websites/widgets for the music industry for big brands such as Linkin Park, The Killers, Eminem and Tim McGraw. And now I create Flash application (prototype) UIs at Sony (San Francisco, CA) supporting C middleware development.

I can’t imagine a life without Flash

I’m planning to post experiments, original tips, comment on platform news & developments and anything I feel relevant. So please keep on visiting and please please leave me comments!