If you're an Atlanta area (or even Macon / Augusta / Chattanooga area) developer and want to learn more about how a developer sees user experience design, make sure you come to the Atlanta Flex User Group meeting tomorrow. I will be giving my presentation:
It's guaranteed to make you laugh, cry, or angry. I'd like to say it's entertaining, but that's just a bit more shameless self-promotion than I'm willing to do (at this time). I think that this presentation is well suited to any type of developer (not just Flex) that wants to learn more about what exactly user experience design is. I've heard, even Sledge Hammer! might be making an appearance.
"We've become a culture of technicians. We're all into the how of it and nobody's stepping back and saying 'But Why?'." -- Joel Salatin, Farmer
Some of you may recognize this quote. It's from a farmer named Joel Salatin. He's featured prominently in the film, "Food, Inc.", which I had a chance to take in recently. While a high impact film unto itself, this quote really popped out and grabbed me. I realized that he wasn't just talking about industrialized food, but society as a whole. Being the developer I am, I internalized this and applied it to our field. We've been so consumed the last few years with the next great technology, essentially the "how", that we've really lost touch with, or just fail to ask, the "Why?" question.
We, as developers, get caught up in the race between the players in the RIA platform space. The truth is that the technology doesn't really matter. In most cases, a Flash Platform based application can tell the story just as well as a Silverlight based solution, or maybe even an AJAX solution. It doesn't matter. The technology is simply a tool that let's us answer the "How?" question. Without answering the "Why?" question though, the technology becomes irrelevant.
As developers, it's our livelihood to be able to quickly and easily answer the "How?" question. However, it's also our responsibility to also help answer the "Why?" question. If you can answer the "Why?" question, you can say that you truly understand your users and what they are trying to accomplish. If we don't listen to our users and their needs, then answering the "How?" question to the best of our abilities is a waste.
The design process is the phase where we ask the "Why?" question of our users. Developers are starting to pull their heads out of the sand and start getting involved in the design process. Developers are starting to gain access to the real motivations and needs of the users. When we start being able to answer the "Why?" questions, we add value to the answers we create for the "How?" questions.
Applying the answers to the "Why?" questions to every line of code you write is what will differentiate you from every other developer who is just as clever as you. Being able to empathize and connect with the user base is a skill that not all developers can cultivate. Cultivate it by engaging in the design process, ask your users why they want certain functionality and interactions. You may not always like the answers you get, but you will at least be engaged in the design process. An engaged developer is much more valuable to the process than someone who just churns code.
Ask "Why?", and bring those answers to your code. You'll have happier, more satisfied, users because they were engaged and their needs incorporated into design and development. Engaged users are users that come back, time and again, and validate the effort and value you bring to the process.
A few months ago, I started a project to make a framework for ColdFusion to enable its functionality as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). I kept running into roadblocks in my mind as how to structure things, but I realized something. Everything I was trying to do to make ColdFusion an ESB was simply hindering tasks that were already easy to do. ColdFusion, out of the box, can function as an ESB.
It wasn't always this way, but over the years, with the addition of things like JMS gateways, .NET integration, HTTP, and FTP integration; it's easy to create workflows that receive data from an input, processes it, and sends it to another destination. ColdFusion 9 enables this even more so with the addition of Sharepoint integration.
Why worry about installing something like Mule? ColdFusion already does everything you need it to do out of the box. ESBs are the next generation in integration. ColdFusion just makes it easier and faster than traditional Java or .NET based solutions.
This past Friday, I gave a presentation, "UX For The Development-Minded" at RIA Unleashed. It went really well, but I have to admit, the audience got short-changed. I actually cut a lot of content out, about one third, because it was orginally written to be a longer form presnetation for 360|Flex. Well, I'm happy to say that you can see the entire presentation, unabridged, at 360|Flex San Jose in March of 2010 because I just got notice that I will be giving the full presentation. Let's call this version the "director's cut."
As many of you know, Universal Mind grew from the ashes of Macromedia Consulting. At the time, there was no talk of Web 2.0, Flex, or anything like that. We grew our business on ColdFusion. ColdFusion is in our DNA. It's always been a part of what we do, but lately I've heard rumblings from the community that Universal Mind has abandoned ColdFusion. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While people have been saying that Universal Mind has left ColdFusion behind, we have been quietly building up our ColdFusion talent with some of the strongest people in the community. Some are names you know, some are names you do not. Chris Scott, Dan Wilson, Laura Arguello, and Dan Skaggs are just a few of the great ColdFusion developers we have working with us.
Yes, we build RIAs. That includes Flex, AJAX, Silverlight, and the technologies that power them, including ColdFusion and Java. We've got some of the best Java talent around too, but that's a post for another day. This all means that we can build not only your RIA, but the complete solution from back to front. When it comes to building ColdFusion back-ends for your Flex application, nobody has more experience than Universal Mind.
So despite rumors to the contrary, our ColdFusion practice is very much alive and kicking. What do we build? Enterprise Class Rich Internet Applications, including those powered by ColdFusion. After all, ColdFusion is in our DNA.
We're just over a week away from Flash Camp Atlanta and tickets are almost sold out. If you're interested in going, but have been on the fence, all the sessions are posted here. There are cheap flights and hotels available still. Sign up today at www.flashcampatlanta.com and ensure your seat before they're all gone!
Time to digest another CFUnited. I didn't go last year because I was not too happy with the event after 2007. It had gotten too kitschy and too, for lack of a better term, silly. This year though, it seems things have turned around. I think we have to attribute that to the conference being under Stellr's guidance.
Overall, I'm very happy with how the flex tracks turned out. Great speakers, great content. The venue was good and it was a bit spread out, but that's how it is. The content in all the sessions was very strong. That's something that has been lacking in years past; the content was too rudimentary. This year, however, it's come back around. I think that competition from 360|Conferences and cf.Objective() has been taken to account and the content has been upped, in concequence.
The high point, for me, was the end of the demo mania when Doug McCune brought the house down. Now, note the irony here, one of the biggest names in the flex community brought the house down to close the show at CFUnited.
If you missed Doug's video (a mashup of the Adobe OSMF and FlexLingo), here it is:
The early bird pricing for Flash Camp Atlanta ends in less than 24 hours! Tickets are on pace to sell out soon, so if you don't want to pay more later, go sign up now. The early bird pricing is dirt cheap, only $40 for the main session and $15 for the introductory session ( an intro to Flash, Flex, and AIR ).
A few days ago, we were having some internal discussions about Flash Camp Atlanta. We had gotten a couple of topics in, and oddly enough, they all had a common theme. So, through part of our discussions, we decided that we were going to have a theme for Flash Camp Atlanta. The first theme we came up with, "80's day", had been done before and was a bit tired. The second idea we had was much better: "Enabling The Convergence of Art & Design With The Flash Platform".
A couple of things inspired this theme. Firstly, this document, by Christian Saylor, has been a huge inspiration in everything we do at Universal Mind. Go ahead, take a minute or two and read it; this post will still be here for you to read. Second, Ben Stucki submitted a topic along these same lines (session descriptions are coming soon). So what does this mean? It means that we are going to strive to have all of our topics tie into this common thread through the day. We've got a great littany of speakers lined up and it's an event that you won't want to miss.
I'm also working on lining up a great venue (not Stats, it's been played out) for the community get together the night before. Also, Delta Airlines announced a slew of cheap fares (as low as $80 roundtrip from Charlotte, NC) today that are valid for the dates of Flash Camp Atlanta.
The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy within the Merapi core, but all the work has paid off. Merapi is finally open-source and available on GoogleCode. The architecture has really changed over the past year, but the core functionality has stayed the same. It's more of a change in how we get messages to the bridge than across the bridge. Regardless though, after a year of forcing you to take our word for what it's doing, you can now go get the code and see yourself.
At some point I will go over some of the changes that are coming to the Java side, but the short, short version is that we're going to be integrating tightly with Spring and leveraging some of the powerful DI that Spring gives us to make the Bridge dynamically configurable. More on that to come later though. Go over to GoogleCode, join the group and let us know what you think!
Better Than It Was
We Will Fall Together
Justified Black Eye
All Star