Emak Mafu Labs Blog

I’ve been thinking this week about how best to describe the work I do here at emak mafu, in particular how I would brand the type of development on a business card.
Often when I meet new people in the the industry I find it difficult to describe my job without A. sounding like the most boring person in the world and B. pigeon-holing my abilities as a developer. Officially my title would be “Flash Developer”, but this brings up connotations of timeline based scripting when the reality is quite different. When you take into account the amount of UML modeling, PHP/MYSQL back-end scripting, Java and Javascript development as well as Flex and MTASC compiling, then the term “Flash Developer” doesn’t seem to do it justice seen as I haven’t used the Flash IDE in a number of weeks. In fact with the re-branding of the “Flash Platform” to the “Adobe Platform” then I have half a mind to re-title myself an “Adobe Platform Developer”.
I think half of the ambiguity is cleared up by the progression towards EcmaScript standards, indeed with our forthcoming move to BlazeDS I look forward to some consistency in the way in which we develop (it was hard enough going back to AS 2). From my perspective, as long as your rocking some design patterns, using an industry standard IDE (eclipse, builder, aptana… pick your poison) and describe what you’re doing in an OO way then I don’t think it matters which languages you are using provided your language supports these features. And this is my point, I don’t think I could handle languages such as LISP or erlang, but give me something that follows an EcmaScript standard and I think it would be quite easy to migrate.
Behold: Alex - “EcmaScript Developer”.