Interview with a Flash Developer

Tween Master

Q: Please tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Zeh, I’m was born in São Paulo in 1977. I like writing code that moves stuff on the screen, and nowadays I work with Actionscript.

Q: How would you describe a day in your shoes?

Wake up, work, eat, work, walk around a bit, go to sleep. I work remotely for Firstborn Multimedia, so I work from home and I have a pretty uneventful day. I also wear flip-flops the entire day instead of shoes.

Q: How long have you been using Flash/Flex?

I’ve started using Flash technology since a few months before Flash 3 was released, so… around 11 years it seems. I wasn’t an exclusive Flash developer at first, though, that came with time. I hated the IDE at first, it looked like a lame vector editor. It took some time until its uses sunk in.

Q: What is it about Flash/Flex that you like the most? What would you change?

What I like the most is how the time coding to execution is so fast. This is sort of difficult to explain, but I like how I’m developing something and then a minute later I’m seeing it animating on the screen. It’s something about the platform and the kind of stuff we usually build, I guess, and it gives me great pleasure, I’m sort of addicted to seeing something moving on the screen and interacting with it.

But after using some platform for such a long time I think you kind of get used to it. You lose the ability to get surprised – you’re not angry with it anymore when something goes wrong, and you’re not overly surprised when something works how it’s supposed to or when something new arrives. In that sense, I don’t think there’s anything I’d change, as I don’t see any blatant mistake or anything. It’s evolving the way it’s supposed to. Sure there are certain things I’d like to change, but I don’t assume they’re universal problems. I’m often mistaken too, so what do I know, I usually keep my conceptions to myself and wait to see whether they turn out to be true or not.

Q: What was the most challenging thing you ever did using actionscript or an actionscript based library/framework?

I think it’s a bit stupid by now, but some work I created for a website a couple of years ago where we needed a page flip-like effect to simulate some user-controlled stickers. I guess it was a lot of pressure developing the entire website and my brain just started melting at a certain point. It worked pretty well, and I’m glad I created it all from scratch and such, but it took me more time than I expected to create it.

Q: What suggestions or sources of inspiration/motivation would you like to share with up and coming Developers?

I guess, do what you love and love what you do. That has served me well over the years… the rest just follows.