Harish Sivaramakrishnan

It feels like yesterday, doesn’t it? It does, at least for me! I remember  sitting in the library of the Macromedia India office in Bangalore on the 2nd of June 2005 waiting for my interviews for a position in the Macromedia Flex SDK Quality Engineering team. I still remember waiting for that one call from Macromedia till it happened on the 6th of June, confirming my appointment at Macromedia! The dream job – in all respects! I have been working on Flash from the first year of my undergrad days (back in 1998) and Macromedia indeed was my ultimate destination. And here it was! I was now going to start working in the company that makes flash! I now have an opportunity to work for a new product that was going to change the landscape of rich internet applications – When I think about it, I still can feel all the emotions that I went through – a combination of excitement, happiness, nervousness – It was that kind of an unexplainable feeling! Yes, I am getting emotional, but that’s exactly how I feel!

And boy, what a great 5 years this has been! I had the great fortune of working on some really amazing features on the Flex 2.0, 2.0.1 & 3.0 releases! I also had an incredible time working in the Adobe Media Player team implementing the DRM features for the 1.0 release. The year 2008 was a significant turning point in my life – I was offered a position in the India Platform Evangelism team. This is the job where I get a chance to travel the breadth and depth of India spreading the love for Adobe Flash platform, I will be working with some of the best minds in Adobe Flash Platform in India in the community – Now, how many people get to do something as cool as this!

This post is incomplete without thanking  a few very important people – Arul Prasad for referring me to Macromedia, Lauren Park & Ram Krishnaiyer for hiring me in Macromedia, Ananth & Arijit for offering me a position in the Evangelism team, Raghu, my partner in crime in both the QE and Evangelism roles, Ramesh for his guidance & support and the whole of India Evangelism team, the best team in the world!

My job couldn’t be more exciting than it is today – With the release of Flash Builder 4, Flex 4, Flash Catalyst and with Flash Player and AIR running in all major devices – there can’t be a better job than evangelizing the Adobe Flash Platform! Here’s is looking forward to great times ahead working for the best company in the world!

Cheers!

There is a lot of excitement after the release of Adobe Flash Builder and Flex 4 framework last week. I can’t wait to meet the Adobe User Groups at various locations to share the excitement and be part of the celebration. I am looking forward to the AUG tour events at the following locations in the coming month(s)

Crystal Gaze – Adobe User Group, Chennai, India (Apr 9th, 2010) The Chennai user group along with RIA-RUI society is organizing Crystal Gaze – a very special event to celebrate the launch of Flash Builder and Flex 4. Chennai has a vibrant and passionate community and I am sure this event is going to be rocking. The event promises a lot of fun with music performances along with the tech sessions. I will be speaking here along with fellow evangelist Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan. The event was sold out in just 8 hours!

Kerala Adobe User Group, Cochin, India (Apr 10th, 2010) Kerala UG is still young, but it has some really great and experienced developers passionate about Adobe Flash Platform. Cochin also happens to be where my parents live, its going to be a great event!

Flex User Group, Singapore (Apr 15th 2010) I was in Singapore last year speaking at RIAction – The Singapore Flash community totally rocks! I will be speaking about Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, we also have a session on Flex 4 by the UG manager Shunjie Hu. I will also be catching up with some of my old buddies from Macromedia during this trip.

FX4Tour – Adobe User Group, Bangkok, Thailand (April 17th, 2010) Another sell-out event! This time in Bangkok.  I will be speaking about Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and LCDS 3. There will also be a session on iphone development using flash by local community expert Apichai Ruangsiripiyakul.

Flex User Group, Coimbatore, India (May 8th, 2010) Will be kicking off the first ever UG meet in coimbatore. Topics are still TBD.

If you guys are in any of the locations, I would love to meet each one of you – do swing by and say hi!

Had a fantastic trip to my Alma mater – BITS, Pilani last week for the first ever Adobe Flex Bootcamp in North India. It felt great to be back in the campus, spent a good deal of time going around all the places I used to frequent as a student (including the classrooms ) The bootcamp had about 300 attendees who turned up exactly at 10:00 AM despite the biting cold (it was almost 0 deg celcius in the morning) Me and Sujit had a great time talking about the Flash Platform, showing off some demos and some really cool stuff with Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. The hands-on lab was great fun too – BITSians are quite smart, most of them completed the 3 hour lab in less than 1.5 hours.

Here are some pictures from the campus and the bootcamp

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

Adobe devsummit completely rocked! The event was a sell out (it was oversold, actually – we got a lot of people register on the spot for the event). The event saw 1300+ attendees join the party in hyderabad and chennai. (That is just 2 cities in south India) Earlier, Adobe devsummit bangalore edition saw 1200+ developers participate! This was also the *largest* Adobe Flash Platform conference ever in India! The kind of buzz that devsummit generated is a testimony to the passion that developers in India have for the Adobe Flash Platform.

I had a lot of fun speaking about Adobe Flash Catalyst and building a video player app ground up just using Flash Catalyst drawing tools. Catalyst generated a lot of buzz among the crowd both in chennai and hyderabad (Most of the flash authoring developers & creative designers were just blown away!) I got some really good feedback for my session in both locations. Many folks emailed me to tell how much they love working with Flash Catalyst

I have uploaded the presentation slides that I used in my talk on Acrobat.com. (Some of my slides are thanks to Ryan Stewart, He has a much more elaborate presentation in his blog, which is a great learning resource as well!)

Download the presentation here

I recieved a lot of messages via twitter and email with folks asking for the source code of the video player application that I built in 2o mins. You can view the application by clicking the following screen shot. You can download the source files (VideoPlayer.fxp) here

A special word of thanks is due to all our community champions and Flash Platform experts who made this event a grand success! Thanks a lot for your support and enthusiasm!

Adobe DevSummit is the biggest annual developer event focused on the Adobe Flash Platform in India. This event attracts a rich demographic mix spanning designers and developers in India. Adobe has consistently showcased path breaking technologies at DevSummit.

For the first time DevSummit is coming to Chennai and Hyderabad. DevSummit in Chennai will be on 24th November, 2009 and in Hyderabad on 1st December, 2009. Watch out this space for more information on venue and timings

We would love to have the experts from the Adobe developer community take the stage and share their knowledge and insights on Adobe Flash Platform. Please find more details and submit your session proposals at the URL below. Show off your Flash Platform Geekiness!

http://flashahead.adobe.com/events/devsummitsessionproposals/

A full house,additional 2 rows of chairs at the back for the folks who came in, kick ass demo’s and fantastic dinner – That’s what the Adobe Flash Platform tools review was.

The evening started with Arijit’s intro on the Flash platform and the new tools. The context behind renaming Flex builder to Flash Builder was captured well in this session and it indeed made a lot of flex guys feel confident about what we are doing in terms of re-branding. The general vibe was surely positive.

In the next 25 minutes, I presented the Flash Builder 4 beta.  I focused the first 10 minutes speaking about the new IDE features that we have added to the tool. (getter-setter generation, event handler code generation and network monitor generated a lot of excitement in the crowd.) In the last 10 minutes I went on to do a coding demo of building an interactive dashboard application using the DCD features of Flash Builder using HTTPService over PHP. Had a minor challenge with the screen resolution, but overall the demo went well. Many folks walked up to me after the event saying they would *absolutely* want to move to FB4 for *just this feature*.

Next was the flash catalyst session by Raghu. He spoke briefly about the need for an good designer to developer integrated workflow and how Flash Catalyst would bridge that gap. His demo was an end to end enterprise data viz app starting from Photoshop to Catalyst to FB4. The interaction design for states & transitions and component conversion features recieved massive applause from the audience. Raghu concluded the demo with a BlazeDS remoting workflow using FB4 DCD. We were bombarded with questions about catalyst features and there were many folks asking about the pricing and the release time lines.

Sujit spoke about the data management features and also did a whirlwind preview of model driven development on the FB4. Sujit also presented the new client side paging feature which recieved a lot of cheer from the audience. As always, Sujit had several guys asking him stuff on LCDS / BlazeDS integration – something Sujit is synonymous with. Ramesh followed Sujit’s session with the “looking forward” aspects. Ramesh also announced the launch plan of the Adobe India Evangelism portal = http://flashahead.adobe.com.

Dinner (quite an awesome one! Taj Residency serves some really good indian fare especially on the dinner menu.) followed and got fantastic feedback on that one too. In a whole, a fantastic event! All thanks to the community and the attendees who made it an astounding success!

Khaleej Times, a leading news paper based out of UAE has a writeup on the mumbai leg of Webinnovations 09 (A leading web 2.0 conference in india). It mentions about Adobe’s innovations in the world of RIAs and also covers my presentation.

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

I, along with Ramesh will be talking at the Great Indian Developer Summit ’08 from May 19-23 at Bangalore. We will be giving a focused session of Flex, AIR and other platform technologies of Adobe. We are also going to have a demo stall running through the 5 days and also plan to have the team to be present there. If you are going to be there, do drop in to the Adobe stall. I am going to be there all the five days and also hoping to meet many of the RIA developers.

The summit also will feature  Yakov Fain from Farata systems talking about building enterprise applications using Flex and Mike Grushin will be talking about developing flex applications over Microsoft technology stack. Ram and Rupesh from Adobe will be talking about Adobe ColdFusion and Adobe Java technologies in the Java thread of the summit. This is certainly something you don’t want to miss!

Raghu and I will be in Bangalore BarCamp 6 [BCB6] as well (19-20 April ’08) If you want to catch up on any flex / AIR / Adobe platform related stuff, catch hold of me at the venue or drop me a mail at hsivaram [at] adobe [dot] com or call me at +91 9980338894. Will be delighted to meet you. See you in BCB6 and (or) GIDS.