topical media & game development
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pv3d.org/2009/08/28/10-things-every-senior-flash-developer-should-know/


10 Things Every Senior Flash Developer Should Know

 Friday, August 28th, 2009 | ActionScript 3

I've interviewed quite a few Flash/Flex developers as potential employees for Roundarch. The hard part for me is knowing exactly what questions to ask to be able to gauge a Flash dev's skill level.

So, I made a list. From my experience this list allows me to judge the skill level and experience of the devs I interview.

If you're not quite Senior level yet, read through the list and study up from the links. If this stuff is old hat to you, please critique this list add more references in the comments.

1. The Elastic Racetrack

 You need to understand when events fire, when code is executed, and when the player renders. It's really the foundational concept of Flash Player.
www.craftymind.com/2008/04/18/updated-elastic-racetrack-for-flash-9-and-avm2/

2. FlexSDK, mxmlc, compc, and all that jazz

 You need to know what's going on when you hit that run button in Eclipse.
www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/as3withmxmlc/
livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=apparch_08.html

3. Player Events, Custom Events, Event Bubbling

 I can't imagine where flash player would be without frames and mouse clicks.
www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/event_handling_as3_03.html
livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/events/package-detail.html
www.tink.ws/blog/custom-events-in-as-30-dont-forget-to-override-the-clone-method/
jacwright.com/blog/70/how-to-listen-to-flash-events-that-dont-bubble/

4. Statements, Keywords, and Directives

 You should never be surprised by a new word in as3. If you don't know what static or override or others are, learn them.
livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/statements.html

5. ASDoc

 Someday, you'll re-read your code and have no idea what it does. The stress here is on proper documenting, but generating asdocs is nice too.
livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=asdoc_3.html

6. Managing visual assets (images, fonts, CSS, etc)

 Flash is visual. So you need to know how to manage assets with code.
www.gskinner.com/talks/flexlovesflash/
code.google.com/p/queueloader-as3/
code.google.com/p/bulk-loader/

7. Arrays, Collections, Dictionaries, Mapping

 You're not just working with one MovieClip here, so you need to know how to control multiple objects at once.
livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/Array.html
www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/07/as3_dictionary.html
code.google.com/p/as3ds/

8. Programmatic motion (tweening, easing)

 If you wanted things to stay still, you should've stuck with HTML
blog.greensock.com/tweenmaxas3/
www.amazon.com/Foundation-Actionscript-3-0-Animation-Making/dp/1590597915/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243014431&sr=8-1

9. OOP and Coding Against Frameworks

 The days of a one huge .as file are over. You need to smartly move your code into organized and reusable objects. Also, now there are plenty of popular as3 frameworks to help manage your code. Read up on them and start using one.
www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/oop_as3.html
www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/684/1/Object-Oriented-Programming-in-AS3/Page1.html

10. Version control

 Unless you think your code is worthless, you need to learn how to back it up properly.
[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

(C) Æliens 04/09/2009

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