Welcome to my journey to build Adobe Flex applications and live to blog about it

Posted by rmcdonald

February 7, 2008

I hope starting a blog is like anything else, where the first step is the hardest. I have spent my time installing and customizing the look of this blog while at the same time struggling with what to include in my first post. After a week, I’ve decided to just start at the beginning.

My name is Robert McDonald, a senior product manager at Intuit for the past 2 1/2 years. I am a mechanical engineer by degree and spent the eight years prior to joining Intuit as an application engineer and product manager for a very successful computer-aided design (CAD) company. It is over those years that I became obsessed with the Internet and the emerging ASP/SaaS market.

So I can almost hear you now… “What is a mechanical engineer doing blogging about software programming?”. What can I say? I am a self-described hack with little formal training, outside of a course in Pascal my sophomore year in college , but writing code is a passion of mine. I have written applications in Visual Basic, Javascript, some ASP and PHP and, of course, Flex.

I can trace the genesis of this blog to a developer conference where I first acquired my interest in Adobe Flex for building rich internet applications. I had just struggled through building an application in Javascript and was still reeling from the process of writing and rewriting my code to address the well-known incompatibilities across Internet browsers. I was blown away by the power, ease and visual beauty of Flex and the with the promise of AIR. The cross-browser compatibility of Flex didn’t hurt either. I couldn’t wait to get home, and ran out immediately to buy some Flex books and start experimenting with Flex.

It wasn’t long after that when I decided to blog about my experiences as I learn, build and deploy Flex applications. In addition, I will also share with you evaluations of new Flex and AIR applications, my thoughts about the future of Internet applications and any other ramblings that may come out.

I’m sure this blog will change as it and I evolve over this journey, and I thank you for your interest in tagging along with me as I go.

Flex