Breaking the $100 Per Hour Barrier

I get this question at least once a year so thought I would write a blog post on it to help others. “How do I make more than $100 per hour?”. I’ve learned a few ways and wanted to share them below. If you want to save time, simply do something other than programming such as flipping houses, investment banking, or being the boss of a mid size company. They make way more money than we do. If you still love programming, but just want to know your options for making more money, read on.

I won’t cover whether money can buy you happiness or not. All I’ll say is that for some people it does, and others it does not.

Many of the financial and tax nomenclature below applies to the USA, but the types of work are the same regardless of country.

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Backbone.js for Flash and Flex Developers

Introduction

The JavaScript web development community has a significant amount of application development frameworks, specifically around creating scalable applications using MVC/MVP/MVVM/MVPM/MVPV/MVSC, etc. Flash & Flex have the same, although not as many, nor as many library dependencies.

Backbone in particular has some longevity amongst the many frameworks available and has been used in some high profile applications (notably Pivotal Tracker). Since I’ve recently been fixing a web application project with a varied history, I’m diving head first into Backbone, and taking a break from diving into Angular.

In this article, I’ll go over what Backbone is, how its features compare to frameworks Flash & Flex Developers are used to, and some implementation details that will help you compare how JavaScript MVC apps compare to Flash and Flex ones.

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Adobe, Please Bring Flash Builder Up To Par

This post is long overdue, and I want to personally apologize to Adobe for taking so long to post it. Adobe (Macromedia?) thrives on customer feedback, early, and makes a serious effort to prioritize on it whilst comparing to their own market research data they do by proactively reaching out. I haven’t done this in a long while, focusing on business vs. the actual tools & runtimes.

It’s long overdue. Flash Builder 4 is a mess, and hopefully fixing/improving the following items will bring it up to par.  If you are a product engineer, skip the intro.

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What I Learned From Microsoft MIX 2010

*** I apologize for the “…”; this is a stream of conscious post about my experiences.  Some of it is cohesive, some not. ***

I attended Microsoft’s MIX 2010 conference in Las Vegas the week after 360Flex.  I had previously attended I think the 2007 or 2008 one.  I had actually recorded a lot of video from the first one and trashed all of it.  The 200x one was an EXTREMELY weird conference.  It occured in the Venetian, the same hotel that Adobe’s MAX was at.  So, I had the opportunity to see the vibe differences between the 2 communities, and whoa man… what a difference.

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