Nice quotation

“Quality is a great business plan. Period.”

- John Lasseter, Pixar

Seeking Adobe Flash development or training?

Please visit the site of my company Orland Media Ltd, where you can find the new course Applied ActionScript 3.0.

New Graphic site launches

Through my company Orland Media Ltd, I have completed development of the site for Irish design agency New Graphic.

The site was built to specification in ActionScript 3.0 and is entirely XML driven, allowing my client to easily update the site themselves without needing to come back to me. The core architecture of the site is very lightweight (therefore fast loading) at only 75Kb.

As far as the technical details go, my decision to create this project using ActionScript 3.0 yielded the following benefits:

• Ten-fold speed increase
• E4X XML parsing (easier data handling)
• Enhanced drawing API
• Simplified and formalised event handling model
• Correct type objects for the job at hand (i.e. Shapes for shapes, Sprites for one frame clips) == lower overhead
• Use of enhanced third party classes, such as TweenLite AS3

The site was engineered entirely using external ActionScript (.as) files and my editor of choice was FlashDevelop.

Some useful programming principles

• KISS
• Hollywood
• DRY

Amateur

Today I was working at a design agency in Soho. Though I like the guys there a lot, down in the basement I saw the strangest thing: the entire wall was covered by very amateur and rather pointless drawings. They were okay, but I found myself sincerely hoping that whoever did them was not paid very much. For as a woman says on the person’s site:

“Your drawings are creepy and horribly freakish and show a warped mind that seriously needs to be examined by a psychologist. Whoever wrote the review for your work also needs their head examining and after that if they still think that your work is of a quality that other people should be subjected to I suggest that they see the work of my 3 year old niece who rivals your ‘expertise’ and sign her for a multi million pound deal that she obviously deserves!”

- Natalie Murphy

Nicely put! Actually it has become fashionable these days for companies to pay people who have barely a modicum of talent to do silly things for them – the more pretentious the better – when they could actually pay far more talented people to do better things. This has been discussed by Dawkins and others in evolutionary terms. The idea is that if you waste a lot of money on stupid things you thereby make a statement “Look at us! We are so successful we can afford to throw money away on silly rubbish”. As I recall Dawkins is critical of this argument, but I can only imagine this is why it is done in business, as it makes no moral or aesthetic sense whatsosver.

How to handle interviews

If you are being interviewed:

When a company interviews you, they are not doing so as a charity and they are not especially interested in what they can give you. They are seeing you because they effectively have a problem, and you have convinced them you might be able to solve it.

If you can indeed solve it, you have no particular reason to be meek and mild or to think of yourself as a lesser person or more needy than the interviewer. While you should not be arrogant, a meek and mild attitude is not going to do you any favours. If you want others to respect you, you should first of all evidently treat yourself with appropriate self respect. Don’t even care about “how you are appearing” and “what they think of you” etc. Just do what you know is right.

You are no less than the interviewer. I don’t even like to call interviews “interviews”. In fact they are meetings, and their purpose as far as I’m concerned is simply to establish whether there is a match of requirements. There might not be. You might not be skilled enough, the company might not be offering to put you where you want to go or they might not be paying enough. That’s fair enough. That’s a result. The company might also make a mistake – they might misjudge you. Well, if this happens and you’re worth having, it’s their loss. Don’t worry about it.

When I go into interviews I am totally relaxed. This tends to be disarming for interviewers, but it’s not deliberate, its just as a result of me having met hundreds of people. I am totally straight about what I know and what I don’t know, so as not to waste anybody’s time, and I am simply interested in explaining what I do and seeing whether it meets what they need. I am never interested in begging for something from them.

See interviews for what they are, don’t even take them personally, remember everyone is entitled to be treated with respect, and just relax.

If you are the interviewer:

I have been an interviewer so I know what this is like. My advice to you is be genuine, don’t try to play any ego games with your interviewee (or any other games), and remember that a person worth having probably knows they are worth having. Treat it like a meeting, that’s all. You are simply interested in assessing if this person 1) has decent social skills (should be obvious) 2) can do the work well 3) is going to stick with the company 4) is requesting an appropriate pay grade. Don’t be overly formal. Indeed if a conclusion one way or the other is becoming obvious even in the interview, then you might as well discuss it. Anything else will look false.

When to fire your client

One of my favourite quotations from the “dot boom” era is this one:

“We had to fire Sony the other week. They weren’t listening to us, so we let them go. We actually had to get rid of Bad Boy [Entertainment] in the beginning, but they straightened up and came back. So did Sony. What the client sometimes doesn’t understand is, the less they talk to us, the better it is. We know what’s best.”

Gene Na, Kioken

Gene is right. If you employ someone for their expertise, of which you have seen evidence, let them get on with the job unhassled – otherwise employ someone else. Here’s further interesting discussion about this issue.

The original Flash greats

I am an advanced Flash developer and I have listed below the sites that originally inspired me to get into Flash back around 1998. Where possible I have linked to them.

Most of these sites are a little out of fashion now – they were made primarily for impact and these days what they can do is taken for granted and is even gratuitous. Also programming techniques are far more advanced now. Nonetheless they were absolutely astonishing when they appeared – like nothing else on the Net. I am happy to admit that the existence of these highly innovative and pioneering sites has actually directly affected the last ten years of my life and were it not for them I would probably not have learned all that I have learned now.

• Ego Media
• Dennis Interactive
• Balthaser
• Nasa 20
• Quintus Flash Index
• 2Advanced
• David Gary Studios
• Yugop
• Der Bauer
• NRG
• Hillman Curtis
• Eye4U

Papervision3D

Quite an amazing technology…

The required skills of a programmer

What does it take to be a programmer (my other job)? If you are serious about being a programmer you will need to develop the following skills:

• The ability to think macroscopically and microscopically about problems. That means the ability to take a “holistic” view and also a strictly compartmentalised view. In applied terms, you need to be able to bear in mind the purpose and activity of an entire application while also being able to concentrate exclusively on small parts of that application.
• Meticulous, almost natural, attention to detail.
• Utter determination. An ability to spend long periods of time (hours on end) honing projects and eliminating problems.
• Vision. You should be able to bear in mind the end result, the interactive work of art you are creating with your code, even as you are concentrating on single lines of computer instructions. Others will not have such vision – you are special to have it.
• Intellect. You need to be reasonably intelligent to do this job. At times you will be required to understand complex concepts. You do not have to be a genius, and the natural intellectual requirements can often be offset by adequate determination, but you need to be fairly intelligent. You also need to be logical but you do not, usually, have to excel at mathematics.
• Initiative. You need to extremely self-motivated and happy to read very big books and understand them (back to determination again). You need to be keen to find your own answers to problems.
• Communication. You will need to be able to articulate what you do in clear English to lesser-skilled people who have no understanding of programming (and they will often be being paid more than you and demanding things that are not feasible).
• Patience. See above.
• Pride. You should try to do the best that the time will allow, every time.
• Humility. You should be aware that however good you think you are, there is someone better than you – and be aware that is not what it is about anyway. Be modest, happy to share what you know, and to learn from others what you do not know.

The required skills of a trainer

What does it take to do the work I do, a trainer? Here are some of the things:

• Confidence. You have to be happy to stand at the front of a class and talk to complete strangers who will review you at the end. You also have to be able to walk into any company, any situation, adapt quickly and meet requirements.
• Social skills. You should be able to build a rapport with virtually anybody and build a rapport between other people too.
• Managerial skills. The ability to motivate people do things and do them to the best of their ability.
• Tact. The ability to point out errors positively.
• Patience. You must be content to repeatedly correct spelling mistakes when you would rather be discussing concepts, and repeat instructions countless times, because you were ignored on previous occasions.
• Tolerance. You must get used to people coughing at the most inopportune moments, forgetting your earlier instructions, and requesting your help during break times. You’ll people claiming “I did that!” when they logically cannot have performed the specified action, starting to ask questions without first thinking through what they actually want to ask, and calling you over to help them without first putting the code on the screen for you to see.
• Optimism. In general, people with aptitude learn on their own and do not go for training – only those without aptitude are sent. As a trainer you know that no matter how well you teach most people, they will never really be competent (partly of a lack of aptitude and partly because they are not interested). But you must be able to put this out of your mind and continue just the same.
• Technical expertise. You have to be ready to answer any question on an enormous range of technical issues – or at least find the answers fast.
• Communication skills. You must be able to demystify and explain complicated issues in plain English.
• Acumen. The ability to gauge and pitch a topic and at an accessible level for the trainee (perhaps telling only 50% of the story, for now).
• Low ego. You must remember that you’re not there to show off what you know and what you can do. You’re there to relay the maximum amount of information possible suited to the client’s needs. Your success is exactly correlated to their understanding.
• Reliability. You cannot miss a day. When people travel from around the world to see you (as they do, on occasion, to see me) you have to be there every time, without fail.

Design rules

“The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.”
Gordon Bell

“There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”
C. A. R. Hoare

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Albert Einstein

“All that is good is simple and all that is simple is good”
Mikhail Kalashnikov

“In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
Bruce Lee

Source

More on training

A trainer said to me recently, when discussing our job:

“Well, I think the most important thing is that at the end of the day everybody has enjoyed themselves.”

It wasn’t a suitable time for me to say so but, leaving aside the cliché, I completely disagree. I think we should, of course, try to make the training enjoyable for people – and the trainees play a role in this too – but in my view the most important thing is that people learn what they came there to learn. It is easy for trainers to turn into entertainers, and if I came in seeking precision knoweldge in a field, and having paid a lot of money for it, I think I’d find too much of that inappropriate.

Training

I spend a lot of my professional time training people in design and programming for the web. I have noticed, disturbingly, that it is easy for some trainers to become arrogant and egotistical, to pontificate to entire rooms and, in short, to lose sight of the fact that they are really only big fish in a very small pond.

Most trainers teach the basics of a variety of applications to beginners, who with sufficient time and self-motivation could learn those basics themselves from the web – and they do nothing but teach. They are not in industry. They perform a role, but should, I think, be modest with it, and aware that there are always others who know a lot, lot more than they do (I am always aware of this!).

There are experts who train, but these tend to me highly sought-after and highly paid industry professsionals who just take time out occasionally to pass on their knowledge. Demand for specialist training is also lower, presumably because most intermediate people already know enough, and are self-motivated enough, to teach themselves the rest.

It is easy to teach the basics to beginners. It is another matter to teach an advanced level to your peers, and a little humility does not go amiss.