nwebb

Yep, we’ve all been made redundant this morning.  Ah well, it gives me time to work on the garden.
Blast! I just remembered I don’t have a garden!!

Not sure what to do yet – take some time off and upgrade my skillset or start looking for work straight away … decisions to be made after I’ve been to the pub :]

I’ve just started looking at the MATE (pronounced mah-teh) framework for Flex. Although I was at 360|Flex in San Jose, I was unfortunately not well enough to attend Laura Arguello’s presentation, but thankfully sessions were recorded so you can watch it here.

Laura and Nahuel have done a fantastic job of creating the slides and putting together a top notch session. The explanations of Dependency Injection (the good and bad points) and Singletons (…good points?! ;) ) are great. This particular section of the presentation starts 36:45 minutes in, and I’d highly recommend you taking a look (even if you’re not currently interested in the framework itself).

Once you’ve watched it you may then want to (re)read a couple of my earlier posts here and here. Even though both approaches offer some advantages over the standard way of going about things, you should now also be able to see limitations with them, and why you may want to consider looking in to a framework such as MATE.

It’s been a busy month…

[Fl]expert
I’ve just been made an Adobe Flex Community Expert ( cheers guys I’m honoured ) so I get to put a cool badge on my blog like this:

:)

360|Flex
Unfortunately I was quite ill during most of 360|Flex San Jose and spent the majority of time in bed. I did manage to drag myself out for my session though. Luckily the presentations are recorded so I will have to watch them now that I’m better. The one full session I did catch was Michael Labriola‘s deepdive talk on DataBinding. Goodness knows, I don’t want to massage his ego any more than necessary but Michael is quite easily one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen, so if you get a chance to see one of his talks at a future conference be sure to check him out. Thanks to all the sponsors and to John & Tom for putting on what I’m sure was another great conference – if only I could have seen it! No thanks to whoever made me ill ;)

In Print
I’ve had a print article published this month in Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine. The article is a guide to Flex and the Google Map AS3 API. The magazine is not currently available in the UK but if you live in the US check it out. I’ve just received my copy and look forward to thumbing through the rest of the content as it looks great.

The Bay Area
The girlfriend and I turned our visit to 360|Flex in to a two week holiday. We both fell in love with The Bay Area ( to the point where we’d both consider moving there once she’s finished her law courses ). We went to San Jose & San Francisco then hired a car and drove along Route One, stopping off in places such as Santa Cruz [ where we rode the rollercoaster featured in The Lost Boys - got to be done! ] and Santa Barbara. We met some fantastic people and had a lot of fun.