This is not a blog about how cool FITC is. For that check out Ruben Swieringa's (who i went along with) two blog posts:
FITC Amsterdam 2009 (day 1)
FITC Amsterdam 2009 (day 2)

This one is gonna be about Grant Skinners session at FITC called 'Things every actionscript developer should know', wich was a session directed to developers. You can see Grant's slide show here: http://www.gskinner.com/talks/things/. (check it out, you might learn something). I am far from gonna cover it all, but will focus on the more abstract parts.

The architect
Grant's session started out with dividing programmer into 3 stages:

• Scripter (learning the language)
  
• Developer (learning structure)
  
• Architect (learning reasoning)

Ofcourse the most interesting here is the architect stage, since that for me is a fairly new word in used in the Flash world. He explains that being an architect means that you know your AS syntax in and out and you are not anymore focusing on what is the best designpatterns to use, but instead focusing on the end result as a whole. In his slides he has a very cool quote from Dune: "This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it", wich was for me very describing of what he actually ment by an architect who didn't care about every little detail before he would actually start coding.



"Every time i read your classes they seem like poetry"
Next up, Grant startet to compare art and code. For what purpose you might ask? We'll if you go through  the 3 stages, the scripter, the developer and the architect, they all have some purposes where you learn importent things as a AS programmer. If you learn all these things you will at some point have gained enough knowledge and skills to break the rules and solve problems in your own creative way, just like a musician needs to learn his instrument, read and play music, before he can write and compose his own masterpieces.

Effeciency
To keep yourself focused it's good to have some goals to work towards. Grant talked about dividing your tasks into what he called micro-deadlines, wich would be of 1-3 day terms. An interesting way of working and I can highly suggest people looking at SCRUM if they want to divide their tasks into smaller goals.

Curtain call
At the endhe encouraged us programmers to start playing! As the slides say: Playing is the way to learn, and move your career in a specific direction. It is importent to find some time to play with some personal projects after work. A lot of speakers tells this as one of the most importent things and I believe they're right.

Grant's session had a lot more that im not gonna cover here, including: design patterns, standards, ressource management (garbage collection) and OOP. Go see one of his sessions next time you have the change. It was certainly one of the best at FITC.