I wish I knew. Honest.

Don’t get me wrong: I do land jobs, and pretty decent ones too. Until last week I was a Senior Flex Developer for a startup in London. No less. And during the  past 15 years (give or take) I had several good others. So all my job interviews could hardly be quoted as “Epic Fails“.

But every now and then, I suffer from a very strange affliction. On a daily basis I am the reasonably smart guy. French smart guy (which says a lot one would say) but I wear glasses and that totally helps. And jokes aside, I believe I wouldn’t be here, doing what I do if I was a complete fraud and being incapable of putting 2 lines of working code together. I don’t think so.

Well, except maybe when I have a job interview… Preferably over the phone.

Even better: a technical one.

This is when the metamorphosis begins. It’s not a physical one but it’s still quite noticeable. I’m sure that when this happens The Twilight Zone’s gimmick can be heard somewhere in the background (I swear!).

And then my brain seems to liquify. It turns into jelly. Or into custard. Depends. It’s more a matter of taste I guess. I arguably prefer custard but I’m not being objective here.

Anyway.

All I know is that I eventually become Jim Carrey, circa 1994, in Dumb and Dumber.

Oh, trust me, this is bad for a job interview. Very bad. It’s just like all I know has suddenly vanished into thin air. Pffft. Gone.

Now close your eyes and imagine yourself as a future employer.

You can do it. Right. Now, would you consider hiring Jim Carrey as a developer?

Nah, me neither (such a funny guy though for those of you who are into visual and delicate, almost feminine sense of humour).

Worse: it looks like the more interesting and challenging the job is, the dumber I get.

Take the interview I had last Friday with Lab49. Lab49 in London is like THE company for a Flex developer. Well, maybe not the only one, but definitely one of the best. This company is literally filled with big guns. Top notches. Guys from Adobe Consulting, MIT graduates and the like. You get in there and you can start thinking you’re doing rather well with your professional life and you would certainly be right.

And one would say: this ain’t no place for a poor self-taught Frenchie who barely speaks English! This guy must be a hell of a dreamer!

And one would probably be right.

But one should mind his own business in the first place (De Niro-like: “You talkin’ to me? You f… my wife?”) This kind of job doesn’t fall from the sky and if you don’t give it a try you’ll certainly won’t get it out of pure luck anyway.

So I tried. Three times actually (Friday was the third – and obviously ultimate – attempt). I must have some kind of pervert attraction for Epic Fails, I don’t know.

One thing is for sure: the temporary mental dysfunction described above expressed itself once again with a rare efficiency. Not my masterpiece in Failure (with a capital F) but still a very honourable performance. Definitely to the level of what was at stake.

In my defense I am a coder, so I code. I don’t talk about it. I do it (well, I talk about it in this blog but stop interrupting me now!). I’ve always been better at developing components rather than describing their lifecycle. I use the whole event system tens of times every day but putting words together to describe how events bubble up, the phone in my hand, staring blankly at the wall before me is just a plain ordeal.

Maybe I should learn by heart Colin Moock’s entire production?

Or should I just drop it and breed sheep in the Alps?

Mmmmhhhh…

Nah, let’s code!

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Today, a moment of self promotion in FlexStuff.co.uk. After all, what is the point of working like crazy 7 days a week and being able to only write a short post every couple of weeks if all this hard work remains unknown? (at least on this side of the pond, those ads being designed for the US market).

As already stated here and there in this blog, I’m currently employed by a London based company named Tailgate Technologies as their lead Flash Platform programmer. And believe me, it’s no easy task to work for a start-up when the global economy has decided at the same time to go deep down the sink. And the recent news about our main competitor surely do not help either (hey, we also had our own TechCrunch article!).

Anyway, we try at Tailgate to create a new type of online ads that actually try to be (at least a little bit) helpful and informative and not just some random stroke inducing stroboscopic animations as most of online ads have turned to be nowadays. It seems sometimes that “creatives” just took Flash only for its sole name and thought that flashing was somehow its one and only function.

The result of this? Nobody seems to give a bloody crap anymore (to quote the locals ) about ads. And I’m just talking here about the most open minded, the others have already long activated some ad blocker, just to avoid what has become an annoyance.

And that’s when we arrive (drums and trumpets here, please) to save you all from boredom!

More seriously, what we attempt to do here is to create micro applications  and not plain stupid ads (we first called them MiniApp, but it sounded a little bit too mini-me so MicroApp it is). It’s literally creating little RIAs, with a proper user experience, real information, actual interactivity and so on. To a certain point (pretty soon actually) people will be able to buy the product straight into the unit itself (the functionality should be ready in a couple of weeks for Direct2Drive).

But better than an explanation, here are two examples. The first one is for Dada US, and is aiming at Ring-tones and MP3 lovers. The MicroApp embeds a search engine, you can browse their top-seller albums with a coverflow-like component, play a 30 seconds preview of any song, etc. Under the hood, it’s entirely developed using Flex 3.3, and a mix of renowned tools and frameworks (Degrafa, Mate, Spring Actionscript, Efflex, Papervision3D, FlexLib, Red5, etc) and some internal tools and what begins to be a proper Tailgate framework (I’ll probably release separately some non-business critical parts in the future).

But here it what it looks like (click on the image to launch the MicroApp):

Dada Ringtones MicroApp (click to Launch)

The second one (and most recent to date) is for the online video game reseller Direct2Drive. Even if it looks a lot like Dada’s, the core engine has significantly evolved, improving and fixing many things Dada’s project revealed. No search engine here, but 3 separate coverflows (tricky to put together if you don’t want to see the CPU rocketing…) and embedded video players (a slightly customized version of FxVideo player), screenshots, etc.
At the moment, the Buy button simply links to Direct2Drive website but, as said above, the entire transaction will be embedded in the application soon.

Direct2Drive MicroApp (click to Launch)

Next?

Well, first: many others like those, some simpler, some probably richer. I (we) believe the idea is good, so why stopping there?.

Second: these microapps are already designed to be modular, and to be customized quickly and easily. So easily actually that it’ll eventually be done by our customers themselves with the authoring tool I’ve already been working on for the past months (in parallel with the microapps). It’s already about 50% done and when it’s finished the tool should be able to automatically generate and compile the bunch of MXML and AS files required for any MicroApp. The user will just have to visually create their apps using various components (no code required, even if a full interactivity will be possible, just like the current miniapps). The platform should also eventually benefit of its own API.

And finally, little pre-weekend gift: a little screenshot of the current prototype.

The future Tailgate Platform Authoring Tool

Hopefully you’ll understand and forgive me now for not being as active on FlexStuff.co.uk as I should…

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QuickLook is definitely one of the (multiple) great tools of Leopard. It really is quite handy, but unfortunately it didn’t (so far) help me in previewing the content of two of the most useful type of files: Flex’s *.mxml and *.as files.

Still, a while back, I had investigated QuickLook plugins, and added a few functionalities like the FLV preview, or the ZIP files preview. But never got any further ever since. So, after a bit of digging, I found this very useful website.

That was good, but not good enough, so after a bit more of digging, this blog finally gave me the answer (and especially the 12th comment) at least for previewing the ActionScript files.

Remained the mxlm ones… Ok, I took my shovel again, and thanks for this article, I finally got my solution (and hopefully yours if you’re reading this).

Right. Let’s go back coding then (says the addict on a Saturday morning).

[UPDATED (25/03/2010)]

It seems at least one of the links is dead (although reachable in Google’s cache). Anyway, I had to redo the whole thing today so I thought I would spare you guys some time by sharing my home backed QLColorCode with MXML and AS files. Enjoy.

QLColorCode.qlgenerator.zip

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