What the Hello World

I know what the world needs - another weblog! There's surely not enough of them out there already...

Welcome to my new weblog, Codedependent (a term which comes from this joke on my humor blog). I intend to use this blog for random discussions of graphics software; demos, tutorials, how-tos, snippets, announcements, algorithms, whatever. I'm also not above the odd humor piece or two (which can be even funnier when people take it seriously, despite my best efforts to be completely ridiculous).

I've recently joined Adobe Systems to work on the Flex SDK. Much of the material I write will be about Flex, Flash, AIR, ActionScript, and related technologies, although I also intend to have non-technology-specific pieces as interesting graphics software topics arise.

I feel the need to offer some kind of explanation to justify my writing this blog. Given some of the stuff out there in the blogosphere, all that bloggers really seem to need is an internet connection and a vague sense of where the keyboard is. But I’m after a higher goal here – I actually want people to read the articles, enjoy them, interact with me, and maybe even learn a thing or two as I, too, will be learning from working on the material.

Anyway, here’s me in brief (not "me in briefs"; this is not that kind of blog): I’ve been developing graphics software for my entire career, after a short-lived stint doing Network Communications, where I realized just how dull that work was. I work on anything that puts the pixels on the screen. I’ve worked on graphics technology at the application level, at the API level, in library development, and even down to the drivers for graphics chips. I was recently at Sun Microsystems, where I was an architect in the desktop client group for the last several years. I worked with all of the technologies in desktop Java, such as the Swing GUI toolkit and the Java 2D rendering layer. Some of my efforts there included hardware-acceleration for Java 2D rendering and, more recently, animation and whizzy graphical effects for Swing. On the topic of nifty graphical effects, I published a book last year with Romain Guy, entitled Filthy Rich Clients.

One of the things that attracted me to Flex, and to Adobe, was a client platform that enables very rich user experiences; transitions, animations, filters, and just darned good-looking UIs are all pretty exciting to this graphics geek. I hope to be able to help make Flex an even richer platform going forward.

As part of my recent stint at Sun, I kept a weblog on java.net; you can check out that blog if you want an idea of the kinds of things that interest me. That blog's postings are pretty Java-specific, since that was the intent, so I probably won't be adding to it in my newfangled life here at Adobe. Instead, I’ve started this new blog to be able to talk about Flex and, well, anything else that seems appropriate.

This should be fun - I hope you can join me. I promise to get more technical in future pieces. I just needed to get this "Who the heck are you?" piece out of the way so that I could get to more interesting material. For example, I've just finished writing a simple vector-drawing application as a way to teach myself about various elements of Flex and Flash. I'll be posting that application and going over the code in upcoming articles for anyone that's interested in learning along with me.

By the way, I also have a humor weblog that I post to when I want to write stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with software (although I have been known to post jokes of a geeky nature there). If it’s technical, look here. If it’s not, look there. And if it's complete junk, look somewhere else.