Education

College
I was the first Associates of Arts Degree graduate in Multimedia from the College of San Mateo in 2000.  In the spring of 1998 while finishing up my general education courses, I took a test class (Intro to Multimedia) the college was offering for a new multimedia program they were planning on rolling out the following Fall. The college coordinated instructors from 4 different divisions (Broadcasting, Graphics, Photography, and Computer Science) to create the program. I had the opportunity to take an interesting mix of technical and artistic classes from visual perception, to photoshop and illustrator, understanding audio/video compression, HTML development, Director, and Flash.

Although many of the specific skills I learned in that program are a bit outdated at this point, what I took away from that experience was to learn how to learn. This is something that has allowed me to have the career I have today.

A few months after I graduated, I had the opportunity to take Lynda.com’s week long Advanced Flash Class taught by Josh Ulm. Here I was introduced to enough base programming concepts so that I could eventually learn Object Oriented Programming techniques on my own.

Conferences
Through school and books I learned a lot about Flash, but it wasn’t until the first Flash Forward Conference in San Francisco in 2000 that my understanding of the possibilities of what Flash offered really hit me. I’ve not only attended many of the Flash Forward Conferences (San Francisco & New York) since then, but also Flash in the Can in Toronto, and recently the online Head Conference. Given the opportunity to attend, a conference can be a great way to quickly see cutting edge techniques other developers are doing with Flash.

Here are some more recent conferences and events I’ve been attending:

Books
Here is a list of books I’m utilizing right now:

  • Essential ActionScript 3.0
  • ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook
  • Flex 3 Cookbook
  • ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns
  • Flash CS4 Professional Advanced
  • Learning ActionScript 3.0