Adobe
First Day
Today was my first day at Adobe.
A month ago, it was so difficult for me to imagine going to a new place, working with new people, and entering a totally new field of work. Today, it was surprisingly easy. Perhaps it is a poignant reminder that the move was such a quick one. Perhaps it was because the new manager and team made it easy for me.
That reminds me that I’ll be working with Mannu Bhai. Well, hopefully, because I don’t think our timings overlap!
What will I be working on?
I’ll be working on Flex – a framework to create Flash (well, I’m hyper-over-simplifying it, but you get the idea). Flex is one of the really hot products from Adobe these days. For example, when you need to display some advanced visualizations on the web today, Flash is the way to go today, and Flex is the best developer-centric way of creating Flash.
What!?
This is a completely new line of work for me, so it’s exciting and worrisome at the same time. I think of it like this – The past two and a half years, I’ve worked on totally web-backend stuff – processing search logs, text processing, database query optimizations, disk space optimizations, simplified distributed computing, etc. Now, I will get to work on totally web-frontend stuff – creating tools that will be used by other developers who will create visually rich websites, and even desktop applications using Apollo in future.
Tech
- Until recently, I never knew Flash was basically a virtual machine that runs bytecodes (in .swf format) just like Java or .NET or Parrot. This means, potentially, you can write in any language as long as you have a compiler to .swf format. Of course, officially, MXML and ActionScript is the way to go.
- The change in ActionScript from an interpreted language (like JavaScript) to a compiled language (in Flash Player 9) resulted in huge performance gains, and I heard that, on an average, it is 10 times faster!
- The whole Flex 2 SDK works on Linux and now you can create, compile, and test a Flex app “entirely using free (as in beer) Linux-based tools”.
Flex your creativity
In case you haven’t heard of Flex… Did you know that the latest Yahoo! Maps uses Flex behind the scenes? Go to adobe.com/products/flex/, click on ‘View the Flex Product Overview’, then click on ‘Case Studies’ and then ‘Yahoo! Maps’.
Now, I’ll get back to playing with Try.Flex.org.