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!

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