AS Development skills sharing at Warwick

Chris was talking today about intra-team/department skills sharing, which I think is a great idea. With regard to Flash and Flex development at Warwick we’ve recently embarked on something along these lines, with the formation of a University Flash and Flex developers group consisting of people actively using (or just interested in) Actionscript development. It started with a forum that was initially populated with ITS people (plus one or two others), but since starting to deliver some Flash courses for ITS Training I wanted to maintain contact with what attendees did with the skills they’d acquired after the course, and the forum was opened up to allow more people to contribute. We held the first ‘skills session’ a couple of weeks ago, in the Teaching Grid. It was purposely an informal gathering, consisting of developers from ITS and departments, plus lots of coffee and biscuits. The session was an opportunity for everyone to show what they’d been working on and share expertise and a mix of ongoing Flash, Flex and AIR projects were demonstrated, plus discussion on development approaches and potential applications in the future.

Overall I thought it went well (we ran out of time in the end) and although next time some structure to the session might help us cover ground more efficiently, the informality and range of projects kept it interesting, and it was especially good to share ideas with others while receiving questions and feedback. As a result of the session, I’ve been asked to present a more formal hour-long session on AIR to the CIS Team next week, which I think I’ll prepare some slides for.

Anyway, my point is that personally I found it quite fun/rewarding to find out what other people were doing or planning to do with the technology, and to see and discuss approaches/methodologies and alternatives; we should definitely do more of this kind of thing in future. Time will tell whether we maintain the Flash/Flex/AIR group sessions but I hope we can.

Warwick staff interested in Flash/Flex/AIR/AS3 development can join the developer group forum here. For students, Warwick Game Design have expertise with Flash for game development.

Steven Carpenter : 09 May 2008 23:18 |  Tags: Air Development Flash Flex ITS |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem