Californnnniiiiaaaaa
Posted on September 18, 2008, under Uncategorized.
So a lot has happened since we last spoke……
I’ve gone full time with Universal Mind. I’m no longer a hired gun. If there was a company to go full time with, it would definitely be this one.
Also, I moved to California. Yeah, that’s kind of a big one. I am no longer an east coaster 4 lyfe 
Thats a big deal for me. As stupid as it is to be tied down to one location, I’ve always been in love with Boston and I will most definitely live there again at some point in my life. Especially if I want my family to speak to me again 
So, no more maps….thank god. Not that it was difficult or a draining….I’m just doing different things now. The reason I moved out to kalifornia is to lead a team at Nvidia. Just another step closer to the video game biz and thats really what the end goal is here people. Don’t get me wrong, I f’in love building web apps, but in the end…..I want to build video games. Maybe I can get rich enough off of this Flex stuff so I can take a year off and just write C stuff to step my game up. Who knows? I don’t. obviously.
Dynamic Marker for Yahoo! Maps AS3/Flex
As I previously whined, I needed a lot of functionality in a Yahoo! marker for a Flex app that isn’t there “out of the box”. I use the term whined, because I personally feel like it’s something that should be “stock” for the lazy/beginner programmers. :::insert baby crying pic here:::
Surprisingly in all my travels, I couldn’t find one out there that fit my needs exactly. Some were close, some had way too much code, some weren’t up to do what I needed, etc… I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to write this one myself. A couple of sessions of prowling through blogs led to my extremely messy desktop to be filled with somewhere between 8-10 different Free Markers. I love free! I waded through all of them individualy and tested them out and also getting ideas from their base classes.
I ended up with this frankenstein of a class that is completely re-usable. It needs some serious code cleanup but I just finished it to a working state and thought I would just release it anyways. Its late and I’m sleepy. I will definitely update this later on when it gets to a better state but for now anyone that needs a quick fix. This will definitely do the trick.
Add this class to your project and instantiate it any way you’d like. Pretty easy, 2 lines of code…1 really long one, but still technically only 2
var marker:CustomIconMarker = new CustomerIconMarker( 0×1c436a, 0×1c436a,0×000000, “Summary Text!!!!”, “http://robotoole.com/blog/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/home_icon.png”), 33.63672, -84.4280661, “marker”);
yahooMap.markerManager.addMarker(marker);
Custom Icon Marker Class - Right Click save as
Unfortunately I can’t show the code for the entire sample app. I haven’t broken the entire thing down from the client’s framework completely, just commented out some states. I will 100% update this, so check back from time to time and yell at me to get a better version out.
As I said previously, this marker will allow for:
- dynamic url to be passed in for the icon
- easily customizable tool tip
- click event dispatching inside of your flex application. No more external interface!!!
Its not much but it gets the job done and from the looks of all the blog comments out there, I wasn’t the only one that needs this. This is very barebones, but also very easily skinnable.you can just change the color for the current balloon and font text or if you’re good with drawing graphics with sprites, draw a new one.
good luck and feel free to add any ideas or complain about how ugly the code is.
just remember, I never said it was going to be pretty.
Yahoo! Maps AS3….giving it a shot
Over the past year and a half I have used the Yahoo! Map AS2 component on multiple projects. It’s always done what I needed it to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Now I need to do some serious skinning and functionality upgrades. Yahoo! AS3 to the rescue. I was thinking about using Mapquests’ badass little API, but I’m not too sure how easy it will be to extend Markers in their framework and unfortunately I don’t really have the time to test it out…..so I gotta go with what I know 
I will most definitely be updating here with a great little component for all(both) of you readers out there to implement easily into your projects.
This component will consist of :
- Dynamic Icon
- Easy skinning of the tooltip
- Click Event dispatching (seriously doesn’t exist yet, I don’t believe it either)
So with a little help of the good ol’ innernetz I should have this up and running within the next week or two.
Wish me luck!
Job Hunting
Posted on May 26, 2008, under Uncategorized.
After reading another wonderful post over on jesse wizzarden’s blog, I decided to write a little about my recent experience in the quest for the perfect job.
I would like to believe that there are good recruiters out there. From my recent experience there aren’t any.
One recruiter in particular kept trying to get me to lie on my resume because I only have a little under 2 years Flex experience. He said his client was looking for 3+years Flex 2/3 experience, so I responded with “But Flex 2 hasn’t been out for 3 years”. That didn’t seem to matter and only confused him more.
Another great time was going through 3 different recruiters to finally get to the actual recruiter that posted the job. I had no idea how cutthroat this business is. Everyone is trying to get their $4/hr off of my hard work.
I talked to 20 different recruiters over the whole process but the leg work I did myself was what worked best. A colleague of mine told me about the new Boston Flex User Group. This is a very big deal, at least to me. I was always very surprised that there hasn’t been one this whole time, the closest one before this was in NYC. So I checked it out and it said it was hosted by Universal Mind. Then I checked them out, they must be a pretty cool company to be running this show. I stumbled across their Join Us page. After reading this listing, I was in shock. How did they get in my head? How did they know my exact current situation and streamline this job listing exactly for me on the fly? It was extremely creepy to say the least.
I sent my resume over asap. I was so excited to send it over. Plus they are in Boston! Home, Sweet Home. That was the best part, especially after all the recruiters trying to send me everywhere from Sacramento to Nowheresville, NJ for 6 month contracts. The Boston part was an assumption by myself, assuming that they host the BFUG meetings, they are in Boston….right? Well, sort of. Their office is 2 hours west of Boston. uh oh, I really don’t want to move out there but its better than St Louis. Nothing personal Cardinal Fans, I’ve just been trying very hard to finally get back home. Thats Ok, I can deal with fairweather Red Sox fans, being that close to New York during baseball season isn’t very fun either but whatever, I’ll deal, this seems like a great company where I can make the next step in my career. Come to find out, the whole company works from home except for a few employees. Seriously, I still don’t believe it. I feel like I’m dreaming.
The craziest part was actually talking to the employer. First Hand! I know, its crazy right? It’s this really weird process, you send your resume and cover letter over, then they like, respond to it. WOW! I had no idea it worked like that. I know this is a very rare case of sending your resume to jobs@yourdreamcompany.com but it really works. TRY IT! I always thought that you had to get your resume into every single recruiter’s hands all over the world and sit back and wait for an HR rep to finally decide to give you a call or setup a techinical interview.
Needless to say the process was anything but painful and I am now sub contracting for Universal Mind. I am so excited/anxious/excited to get cracking on my first project for UM. Am I awake yet? I better be, I’m starting tomorrow.
How it all started
I was trying to think about what to write about here first, and I thought, “Hey, It’s called robotoole.com for a reason”. So I will explain my trials and tribulations of becoming a software engineer in todays re-energized IT world.
It all started in 2002……ya it’s going to be one of those rants. I had just “graduated”, I use that term loosely because I didn’t get a relevant piece of paper that a real company gave a crap about. Who needs english class anyways? I guess human resources does because they could care less what you know unless you have a BS in comp science or equivalent. It was my own fault, I knew some basics of programming already and thought (pre 9-11, literally months), the market is so great, I just need some credentials and I’m in. I was so excited because I was chock full of Java knowledge and was ready to make my mark on the world wide web. Too bad it took me almost 4 years to get anyone to respond to my resume. I jumped from Atlanta to Boston to Hartford back to Atlanta and then back up to Boston where I finally found a job in Providence. Waiting tables and doing crappy HTML sites here and there trying to stay somewhat fresh the whole while. My first real opportunity was where I just left on Friday afternoon, Connect Studios.
This company was literally the best thing that could of ever happened to me. I was two weeks away from getting my real estate license and giving up on ever finding a programming job. Connect was a startup web development company and I was employee #3. It was myself(Java/Backend guy), a designer, and a php developer. As soon as I walked in the door I was learning. On my first day, my boss walked up to me and said “I want to make the blog on our site dynamic, I(my boss) threw it together in Flash and its just sitting there nice and static”. I thought to myself, did this guy even read my resume, where did it say I knew Flash…I thought he was kidding at first. Zomg! what I am I going to do?. Sourceforge to the rescue! On my first day I was editing a Flash Blog in Actionscript 2.0, and installing Wordpress. It took me about 3 days to get it approved for our company website and mission 1 was accomplished. I built 1 and half html/php based sites (learning php as I went), and that was the last time I used Dreamweaver on a daily basis. About a month in, my boss walked in asked the php guy and myself if we wanted to learn Flex. It was right back to the old bread and butter. Software Development.
I jumped on the opportunity to get paid to learn, and the php guy is still editing drupal sites. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I just think he has the wrong mindset for the IT field. Not wanting to learn anything new means you’ll be outdated very very quickly. You might have a good run if its something mainstream like PHP or Java but eventually you’ll need to learn something new. Very excitedly, I went to Barnes and Noble that evening and the bought the only Flex Book they had. Honestly I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought, sure I’ll learn this Flex thing for this project, no prob. Little did I know I was learning 3 languages over the course of this next month instead of just Flex. Actionscript 3, MXML, and ColdFusion for the backend. I was in over my head for that first month, big time. I stuck with it though, sitting in the corner with instrumental beats flowing through my headphones while I read and read and read. I can’t stress enough how incredible of a learning tool Lynda.com is as well. I honestly learned more there than anywhere else.
After the designer left and a new one stepped in that actually had a Flash programming background, it was on like donkey kong. I had someone there that could show me the intricacies of the Flash Player and Actionscript as a whole. There was a lot of “WTF that works in Actionscript 2.0″ but after that initial shock that AS3 was actually a more structured programming language then the ever forgiving AS2, we really started to make some headway.
Luckily, my boss had no problem moving far away from the HTML based projects and towards the software development side of things. The only problem with the company was that my boss who was also the owner, was a partner in another company, the company that actually made him money instead of costing him money. He opened the web shop as a personal side project and it took way too much of his time away from his main source of income. Eventually it was myself and the two other developers running the show, because he couldn’t devote enough of his time to us. The natural progression of the quality of my code is what really impressed me the most, apart from the experience of running a web development company. Handling a client from the initial email inquiry to the final delivered product is something that cannot be taught. You have to experience that for yourself.
A little over a year and a half pass, and a lot of projects later, things started to change. The whole time I worked there, we were always kept in the loop. Then the visits slowly started diminishing as the last couple months let on. I got a funny feeling like something wasn’t right, so I updated my resume and posted it on Dice on a Sunday afternoon. When I posted my resume I had no intentions of leaving, just wanted to see what was out there for me if I did have to go back on the market. Sunday evening I posted it, Monday morning I was awoken by a recruiter, then another an hour later, then another, then another…until I took my phone number down. duh. I had no idea what to do. I tried for so long to get a real world job and got nothing, i mean NOTHING, in response, and now I have people emailing/calling me like I just won the lottery. The whole process was very surreal to say the least.
The one thing I made sure I did when I finally got this opportunity to write code for a living, was to not feel like I wasted a single moment. I really busted my ass for the past year and 7 months. A week hasn’t gone by where I didn’t work 50+ hours. Mostly ranging from 55-60 but who’s bragging. Not my girlfriend thats for sure. I really didn’t want to think I wasted this chance, and I didn’t. Not a second, Sun-Fri every week, whether it was crunch time or we were right on schedule. To see that it all came to fruition is the craziest part. I am a “hot commodity” now and I have the power to chose where and what to do.
Now if I had been writing Java this whole time the phone might not have been ringing as much, but it still would of been ringing. Flex is the future of the Rich Internet Application world. I am so excited to be a part of this ever growing community. I owe so much to this community that has taught almost everything I know, I can’t wait to pay it forward.
Ugh.
Posted on May 23, 2008, under Uncategorized.
never buy a godaddy server. never.
when something actually says, 99% chance that it will work. why am i always in that 1%?
that is all for now.