First up – the most exciting news: we’ve managed to secure some sponsorship for try{harder} Level Up, that will reduce the price for freelancers (including those already signed up). If the cost is what was holding you back, get in touch – there’s only 10 days to go! More info coming very shortly – we’re just finalising details, but I’m taking names who are interested.

But that also brings me right to the point: describing try{harder} has become much more difficult since the Adobe ‘incident’ in November.

The original strap-line, “collaborative learning for flash-platform developers”, now feels like it weighs us down. That flash-platform is being eroded daily – we’re stuck in our very own 2D adventure game, and the ground is breaking up around us. Perhaps it’s on fire in some places… with particle effects and everything! Can’t do that in HTML5 can you? Oh… but… anyway…

We will always be flash developers

Regardless of what tech we’re building our projects in tomorrow, if you and I have both spent three, or five, or even ten years building projects that were anchored by whatever incarnation the flash player was in at the time, that experience changed us. Our brains have been physically moulded by that process. We can’t un-make those connections.

Not to say that we’re identical, but the nature of the brain-wiring that the process creates gives us a good chance of being able to have efficient, high quality communication about a problem. I often have great conversations with developers who work in other technologies, but the most concentrated goodness comes from sharing with other advanced AS3 devs, and the buzz I’ve experienced at FOTB tells me that I’m not alone. (Not that AS3 devs are better, but that my brain can dig their brain more effectively).

Crucially, the label “flash developer” gives us a way to identify each other – to recognise each other as potential sources of support. We’re a tribe, and the “flash developer” label serves the same purpose as the Christian cross, or the rainbow – it allows us to find each other in the crowd (or on Twitter), even if we’ve never met before.

And now, without much warning, the buffalo have gone away and our tribe is breaking apart.

The pain you feel is not about technology

I’ve felt anxious on and off since that horrible week in November – how about you? And I know that my anxiety is not about the requirement to learn something new – I love learning new things, and I know that much of my understanding of development is language and platform independent. But I still feel anxious.

I suspect that the source of the anxiety is the breaking up of our tribe. It feels similar to the early-adulthood exodus. My friends who stayed behind in the town we’d grown up in feel that those who left thought they were stupid for staying behind. Those of us who left feel that we’re no longer welcome in the places most familiar to us.

The flash-platform community is going through the same process as a million tribes before it. After a period of prosperity and stability, something shifts. The population outgrows the resources, or those resources are randomly disrupted, or there are rumours of dragons in the forests or gold in the river beyond the mountain. And some people up and leave straight away, and others follow them soon after – perhaps unsure which trail to take, but figuring that any path out is better than staying behind, and some folk can’t leave, or choose to stay behind.

Sharing without judging

In these circumstances, it’s hard to share our new experiences in technology without sometimes feeling like we’re being judged. “Hey, check out this awesome js framework!” has an echo of “Quit hanging around where there are no buffalo, stupid!” for those of us who are still shivering at the thought of actually writing JavaScript as a day job. (Hold any feedback on whether writing JS is actually fun or not, that’s not the point!)

And those of us who are left behind are, no doubt, increasingly defensive in our responses. It’s not that we don’t value your advice that we should be moving on, it’s just that really, we don’t want to hear it – because it suggests that we’re just uninformed, and in need of persuasion for our own good. So we don’t even respond with our usual respectful curiosity, we either bat it away or make references to the emperor’s new clothes. We RT the people who agree with us and gradually unfollow those who don’t.

So communication in these situations becomes increasingly hard, but it’s necessary. If we want to continue to benefit from the larger tribe’s shared pool of knowledge and wisdom and technology, and not all be sitting in our little caves reinventing the wheel (or asynchronous process token) from scratch, we have to push through this phase. We have to try to keep the communication going between those who stayed behind in the village and those who are forging new trails, without judging each other for being in either position.

try{harder} is a tool for keeping our tribe together

I’m lucky to have found myself some amazing individuals who also happen to be flash platform developers – some of them now panning for js gold, some of them still in the flash village. try{harder} is an opportunity to share with each other in a style that is intentionally de-polarising. We aim for a balance between the concrete and the abstract in our seminars – it’s not just ‘inspiration’, but neither is it so technically specific that it’s only relevant to a subsection of the group.

We’re a small enough crowd that it’s inevitable that before the week is out, everybody will have asked at least one naive question, so we encourage and respond positively to naive questions as well as expertise. And our shared fluency in AS3 gives us a solid basis for communicating complex ideas, and collaborating in AS3 or other technologies.

But “collaborative training for advanced developers-who-have-a-shared-basis-for-understanding-as-a-result-of-having-spent-significant-time-working-with-flash” doesn’t really trip off the tongue.

About the Author

I'm an actionscript programmer living and working in a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales, UK. I used to be a TV reporter, but my inner (and often outer) geek won. I also write stuff. Most recently Head First 2D Geometry.

Visit Stray's Website Visit Stray on Twitter