I’ll admit it, reading Jesse Warden’s post gave me a bit of nostalgia in thinking about the old days of Flex and the community. I can remember when Matt Chotin was all over Flexcoders. You could email at any time of day or night and he’d respond and help you out. Ely Greenfield actually had time to build components. The iteration:two guys were just starting with Cairngorm and had written the bible that every Flex developer knew by heart. Guys like Jesse were hacking around with Flex and Flash trying to mix the experiences together. We were all kind of screwing around on this new technology and having a blast doing it. I think we all still are but it’s got a different feel today.

The community is a lot bigger. Flexcoders is gigantic (check out the message history). Matt and Ely are both driving the direction of the Flex Framework (and still not sleeping). iteration:two was acquired and now Cairngorm is up on labs. There are a ton of great Flex books out and guys like Jesse’s rates are through the roof because Flex is in demand. Big time. A bunch of the companies at DEMO this week rolled out Flex applications. We have everything from Blist (web-based database) to Sprout (a web-based Flash IDE) to Seesmic (video Twitter). It’s humbling to think back to Flex 1.5 and Flash Player 7. We’ve come a very long way.

But there’s still a lot to do. Flex 4 is going to be awesome and we’re working on tools like Thermo to help Flex developers get even more creative. The footprint of Flex has expanded as well. It works much more closely with Ajax and you can use it to build desktop applications with AIR. So Jesse is going to MIX which kind of bums me out because he’s always fun to hang out with (though I’ll be at MIX so maybe I can hang with him there). At least he’s speaking at 360|Flex, another example of the great growth of the community.

It’s not the same as it was but it’s still a lot of fun. I’ll look back fondly on how the Flex community grew up. If the next 3 years are anything like the last 3 it’s going to be a really crazy ride. RIAs have such a tremendous amount of momentum that the end is nowhere in sight. It’s good to keep up on the whole space but keep in mind that the DNA that helped foster Flex in the old days is still alive and well. It’s just bigger now…..and charging more an hour

[tags]Jesse Warden, Flex[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Why You Need to Take Jesse Warden’s MAX Session
2. Jesse James Garrett Gives AIR Two Thumbs Up
3. How Flex Should Be
4. The Changing World of Flash Employment
5. In San Jose for Google Developer Days