bwpdsigns.com

So blogging is obviously not a priority. My trend seems to be one post each year stating “hey I haven’t posted in a year” so why bother posting now? Great question.

Picked up Rocksmith a week or so ago. I’m completely addicted, it’s completely reignited my need to play my guitar. Good right? Even added a category for anything related to the game.

Back in the day blogging was fun. Posting random crap about music, life, beer, cars and bitching about work was a pretty common thing to do. Today? Well there’s Facebook, it’s a guaranteed outlet to people who may actually read and interact with something I post, it is far simpler and pretty much a part of every site and application out there. So that’s where many of the things that would appear on this blog have ended up. Not friends with me? Sorry, most likely if you visit this site you are just a comment spammer hoping I approve our comment so you can blast ads on my posts anyway. If you aren’t a spammer, sorry, thanks for reading.

So following the last post here’s where I’m at in 2012, apparently not much further along than 2011.

2012 Goals

1. WordPress
   WordPress is something I should have a much better grasp on, I guess I should make a goal to build up some more knowledge of it.
2. Interactive Development (aka turning my flash knowledge into Javascript and CSS)
   Yeah, I know “Flash is Dead”. Thankfully all the killer skills that I build up coding a nicely structured language like AS3 will apply to other languages.
3. Sites
   I have a few of them. I really don’t have plans at this point. I should do something with them. Hell I said I need some WP experience so why not build it up by building my sites.
4. Learning / Skill Development
   There’s a lot of great tech out there, I use the following at work. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Grails, NodeJS and a few others. Besides building up these further, I’m going to continue looking at Flash Game coding and iOS.
5. Life
   Stay alive, stay employed and stay healthy. What more can you ask
6. Creative Outlets
   I really need to pick up my guitars more often, they need a good dusting off also. It would be nice if I picked up a pencil occasionally too, drawing MLP with my 6yr old niece is fun but I should try to do something artistic occasionally too.

Are you still reading? Crazy.

See you in 2013.

Does that mean this blog is dead? Probably. Can it be brought back to life? Possibly. Should it be brought back to live? Why not. Does anyone care other than myself? Probably not. Though I’m sure there’s plenty of comment spammers out there thinking the more blogs on the net the better.

2010 Recap.

Looking at the last post from last year, it seemed like I was stumbling over what to focus on and what to learn. I spent quite a bit of time looking at many of the things that I listed, did I master any of them? Hardly. I did make a considerable amount of progress in all areas though. ActionScripting is still my primary skill, HTML / CSS are foundation skills, Javascript is a necessary evil and these days, you can’t expect to be in this field without it. iOS, Android, PHP and so on. Dabbled, made progress and well that’s about it. Quite a bit of time learning about them, quite a bit of time experimenting, nothing really to show for it. Would I sell myself as an iOS, Android or PHP dev… nope.

Looking forward to 2011.

I’m off to a great start so far in 2011, I’m starting a new job the 31st and can’t wait. Focusing on ActionScript at the new gig, though I think there may be a bit more opportunity to be a bit more well rounded at this one. We’ll see.

Sites?

So what’s the status of various sites I have? Good question. Here’s the plan, hopefully someday it will actually work out that they are all maintained.

• bwpdsigns.com – Hopefully I’ll make an effort to blog more about tech I’m working with. There are so many great tutorial and tech sites out there it’s hard to think I’d have anything to contribute. Then again there are equally as many bad sites out there.
• pauluscreative.com – The future home of everything related to the freelance work that I do. Right now it’s in an extremely early stage of development. It’s live but, there’s no content.
• bryanpaulus.com – My old portfolio site and probably one of my earliest examples of a complete XML driven flash site. Painfully out of date.

This doesn’t even start to account for the sites related to my wife’s business. Maybe my goal for 2011 should be to finally get all these sites updated and launched.

Now the challenge is to make sure this isn’t the only post of 2011.

In a time when the market is both full of opportunity and challenges, the question continues to be where will tech turn next? As a developer you should always be striving to not only expand upon what you know but also picking up new tools to add to your skill set. Now the question is what should I do next?

Flash:
Definitely not a dead technology, not seeing any signs of declining or is it? There’s plenty of talk about the future of Flash as it relates to AJAX, HTML 5 and CSS 3 but how fast will these technologies knock down the current king of rich content on the web. I’m not going to go to far with this because there are far better sources of discussion on the topic.

As it relates to me, I’ve been on a path of full focused Flash / ActionScript development over the past several years. While I definitely advanced my skills considerable, my concerns are at this point is being a straight up Flash Developer really a path to longevity in this field. Obviously this is my primary focus since currently my day job is 100% Flash and ActionScript. It will continue to be as well, but I’m more concerned with adding to my skill set so I’ll bring this discussion back to that.

iPhone:
iPhone development doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Even if rumors aren’t true, the field will only grow, especially if when the language expands to future devices, such as the rumored tablet / slate device. This is an area I’ve dabbled with. I have my app idea, its just a matter of focusing on it.

The question here is how does one decide that this is an area I want to explore? It’s great hearing that people are making big bucks on apps that just happen to break through on the store. Is that a reality? With the number of apps on the store, I’m pretty sure that unless happen to have a moment of genius, there will be less stories of weekend warriors making 6 figures off a game they programmed in their spare time.

Still this is definitely an area to be focusing on and one that I’ll be attempting to dive back into. I’d be silly not to.

Android:
Like iPhone, Android is just waiting for it’s moment, it’s off to a slow start compared to iPhone I think but it’s going to have a strong following and many opportunities. iPhone generates a buzz and has companies scrambling to get their app together for that. Clients hear iPhone and want to know how to get into that market, whether they should be there or not. It may happen that Android could do this also.

webOS (Palm):
The Pre is a cool phone. Honestly if want to get into a growing market maybe this would be a great place to focus. Will it get to the point of the iPhone app store? Not likely. Something to look into? Sure, why not, you may just happen to find yourself in a position that you have a skill that may have a limited demand.

Server Side:
I keep coming back to the idea that I should be focusing on learning some sort of server side language, PHP, JSP, .NET, but I never seem to put much focus into it. I keep hoping one will click and I’ll learn enough that I’ll feel comfortable selling my services in one of these areas. Currently I’m exploring PHP with the Zend Framework and will probably dabble with it more in the near future. Is there a market for professional PHP development?

HTML/CSS/AJAX/jQuery:
My roots are HTML & CSS and these are skills that I’ll continue to expand on. There is quite a bit going on in the HTML realm and plenty to keep learning. HTML 5 may change the rules and cause a bit of a shake up. Throw in CSS 3, AJAX and jQuery, that’s a full year of things to learn. I see plenty of my free time coming back to basics and brushing up on how people are using the new HTML 5 tags. This is an area that’s not going anywhere.

In Conclusion:
Did you read all of that? Really? Thanks. Basically this post is more for me than for anyone else. Isn’t that what blogs are for anyway? To babble as if your the center of the universe?

The list above shakes out this way, Flash (it’s my job, it pays my bills and it’s still quite fun), HTML (basic foundation of all web developers skills), iPhone (why not try to tap into this market, plus I work for an ad agency, thinking our clients won’t want iPhone apps is not setting myself up for job security), Android, Server-Side.

WebOS is something I’ll look into just to see what’s involved. Also, if you’re an app creator why limit yourself to just one market. If you have an iPhone app, port it to Android and webOS if it’s not overly involved.

Months later, here I am, once again looking at the state of this site. Progress is null. I wish I could say that it’s because I’ve been focusing on all the exciting projects that are keeping me busy. Truthfully it’s just that I’m still figuring things out for this site. I think the move to WP has helped me refocus the site. I like the structure of the info. The “temporary” template is serving the purpose, I’ve even received a few compliments on it, which is funny and sad all at the same time.

Looking toward 2010…

Keeping with tradition, I’m hoping that 2010 will see a new design and a bit more focus on getting this site rolling again. Also on my list are the following:

• ebonypaws.com
• pauluscreative.com

Both sites have designs but just need to be further flushed out and built.

Stay Tuned…

As you can see, I haven’t made any progress on tweaking this theme. Oh, I changed the logo but that’s about it. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m super busy, but that would be stretching the truth a bit. I think mostly I’m back to not knowing what I want to do with this site and being super critical of pretty much anything i start working on.

Anyway, enough babbling. I’m going home.

Added a quick theme that I found, it’s a decent one, I adjusted the categories and notices what’s either a bug in WP or in the theme. Basically WP wouldn’t show any category names after “uncategorized” alphabetically. Has to be the theme. No way that bug has lasted this long.

I’ve moved hosting and converted to WordPress. So now I just need to either spend some time converting my MoveableType template over or design a new site. Neither seem much fun but hell I need to get used to working with WordPress.

So it looks like this will be the first post of 2009. I’ll try not to let you down.
Where have I been? What have I been up to?
Things are flying by at a pace that’s just unbelievable. It’s already near the end of February. What have I been doing? Well. Let’s see.
Work
Work is good, I’m employed and these days that’s by far the most important thing. Regarding work I spent most of January working on another AS3 site. Good stuff, refined a few things from previous projects and am continuing to love being Flash only.
I’m going to have to get some of my work from here up into the portfolio section. I’ll put that on my list.
WOW
Sticking with the “W” theme, so have I been playing much? Well lets just say that because of the fact that we seem to get a new CC every other week because some company can’t guard their data. I didn’t realize that my account wasn’t active for a good part of January. So no not playing much WOW these days and you’ll see why in a few…
Back to the Gym…
Keeping with the tradition of new years resolutions, we’re back to the gym. This is nothing new for us, we’re usually very motivated the first few months of the year, right up until we start hitting the weekly BBQs. It’s going well so far. Actually I should say that we’re sticking with it pretty well, not sure how much of an effect it’s having. It will pay off eventually…I hope.
Guitars
In the basement getting dusty.
Music
Started listening to a cool band Kataklysm. Picked up “In the Arms of Devastation”, “Prevail” and “Shadows and Dust” from iTunes. Good stuff. Otherwise I’m just letting my iPod play on shuffle. Also have a strange fascination with the song from Devildriver – “I Dream I Died” not sure why, just a great track.
Other
Picked up pauluscreative.com, just because, not sure how it’s going to fit in with the current domains or if I really needed it. I guess it’s the curse of cheap domains from goDaddy.com.
iPod Touch
Did I mention I picked up an iPod Touch? Oh well no one reads this anyway. Seriously wish I would have just ditched Sprint and went for the iPhone. This thing is amazing, a great replacement for my 3rd gen iPod that had to be hard reset every week. A few nit-picky little things but overall well worth the investment. Plus it opens up a whole new line of technology that I need to dabble with.
My favorite apps:
TapDefense – Seriously addicting Tower Defense game ( I just can’t seem to beat medium )
Lose It – Going with the gym theme really great way to keep track of calories
iFitness – Decent workout app, updated really frequently, not too heavy of a download and pretty flexible and worth the $2
MySpace and Facebook – I actually check these now
Hero of Sparta – amazing game, should really play it more.
gotta run, see you in a few months…