Blogs

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.

As mentioned in my previous post, last week I went to FITC Amsterdam 2009 together with my colleague Martin, and boy did we have a good time. Here's a review of some of cool stuff from the tuesday-sessions (the second day of FITC):

Keith Peter's art - During his 60 minutes, Keith Peters talked about one of his newer websites artfromcode.com and making, well ehm, art from code. Keith showed off some pieces he wrote out in the past few months and explained some of the logic behind them.

Mario Klingemann's tinkering - Just before lunch Mario Klingemann set off to talk about triangles in his session titled "The tinkerer's box". Starting out with dividing up triangles in a seemingly plain manner, he gradually added functionality and eventually ended up with some really amazing stuff. Very neat indeed.

Jared Ficklin's sound - Had Jared Ficklin been my highschool science-teacher then (to say the least) I would have been a hell of a lot more interested in the subject. During his session "Seeing sound" he showed us how similar most Nirvana-songs really are, how to make a spectrum analyzer that visualizes audio with fire and the reach of sound-waves with smoking barrels (litterally).

more photos of FITC Amsterdam 2009 on my Flickr profile

Last week a colleague and I headed off to Amsterdam to go check out FITC 2009, here's a run-down on some of the highlights of the first day:

Ralph Hauwert's pixel-pushing - During his session "Professionally pushing pixels (with Flash 10)", Ralph Hauwert showed off some really neat tricks with Pixel Bender, the preview-version of Adobe's C/C++ magic-box for Flash codenamed Alchemy, and the new 3D API in Flash (demos of the latter were posted on his blog back in november)

Grant Skinner's coding-standards - Right after lunch Grant Skinner made a very solid attempt on trying to get people to write more decent code during his talk titled "Things every Actionscript developer should know". To us the most valuable part of the session was where Grant shed his light on the process of going from being a scripter (focused on completion) to being a developer (focusing on correctness, i.e. perfection in code-structure) and ultimately becoming an architect (mainly focusing on getting the job done cleanly) - a real eye-opener, 'nuff said.

Florian Schmitt's story - Nearing the end of the day and starting to notice the effect of an overload of information I sat down at Florian Schmitt's session "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" simply looking for some cool and inspiring stuff, and eventually getting exactly that, and more than some.
Florian told his story about moving from London to Germany with his wife Alexandra in the late nineties, setting up the now famous design-studio Hi-ReS!. Florian's session was in my opinion one of the most inspiring and creativity-boosted sessions of the day, hands down.

more photos of FITC Amsterdam 2009 on my Flickr profile