Harish Sivaramakrishnan

2009 has been a fantastic year! The last 1.5 years I spent in the Platform Evangelism team at Adobe India has been fantastic – The stuff I get to do as an evangelist is what dream jobs are made of. I am extremely excited looking at 2010, where  there are a lot of great things lined up.Here is my recap of the year that was 2009

2009 was a truly action-packed one. Through the last 12 months, I made 21 trips to more than 10 cities all over India and Singapore and managed to speak to approximately 10000 people. This year also saw me getting more active on twitter, and also move my blog from wordpress to my own domain. Blog traffic grew 100%, with largest number of hits coming from India (33.60%) followed by United States (19.20%). The top 5 countries that generate traffic to my website are India, US, China, France, Brazil and Korea. My blog post on building a Gantt chart component using Flex 3 remains the top hit / top searched post on my blog, followed by my Flex 4 theme – Somethinglikemac!. I am amazed at the number of people downloading the Flex 4 theme. Its great to see that a large number of flex developers are already working with Flex 4 and Flash Catalyst. The best day for my blog was Dec 19th, when there was a surge of hits to my mac theme post, which brought my blog down for some time. 48% of my traffic came from referring sites, with a special thanks to Scalenine and fellow evangelist Sujit‘s blog

Few highlights of this year include Adobe devsummit 09 Bangalore edition which saw 1200+ attendees join us – which made it the largest Adobe Flash Platform conference ever in India. The Chennai and Hyderabad editions had another 1300+ developers join the party. The first ever flex student bootcamp in kerala, India happened this year and trough the student bootcamps alone we addressed around 2000+ students. I also got featured in Khaleej Times (a leading news paper based out of Dubai) after my talk on Adobe Flash Platform at Webinnovations conference in Mumbai. On the lighter side, this year also had me running a flash catalyst session for an audience size of 200 people without a projector How many people would get to do something like that!

2010 already looks exciting! With the Flash community in India buzzing like never before, I am sure it is going to be one hell of a ride! Like Serge mentions in his blog – Being an evangelist is one of the coolest job in the universe! With heavy weight releases like Flash Player 10.1, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst, AIR 2.0 -  year 2010 is going to be a crazy party for sure!

The writing style of this post is inspired by Serge Jespers‘s life as an evangelist post