Jesse Randall Warden

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you. To paraphrase David Samuel, the bloke who got me into personal branding after I saw him speak a few years ago; he spoke about of why you need personal branding. His audience was a group from a large teleco... (more)

Code Reuse - Pros and Cons

Depending on the scope of your project, you may have the opportunity for code reuse. The reasons you might want to do so are two-fold. First, you reduce duplication of efforts. If you have already created a hyperlink enabled CellRenderer for your DataGrid once, why do it again? Second, you create, or build upon, an ever growing utility code base. While it may not be in the "utils" package per se, you'll soon end up with re-usable events, common GUI controls and widgets, and yes even utility classes. Whether by merely being in a different folder means the client doesn't own it is ... (more)

Jesse Randall Warden's JesterXL Blog: Binding in the Trenches

It's 7:50 pm on Sunday, and I'm still working. I figured I'd share why I'm debugging like crazy instead of relaxing. Bindings. For those of who know of Flex 2, Adobe's tool for programmers to create Rich Internet Applications, it has this one feature that sets it apart from Flash, and incidentally, its brother Spry shares. It allows you to put a variable surrounded by curly brackets, and at runtime, anytime that variable changes, it'll update whatever variable is being set to it. So, for a TextField, you can bind a global text property to the TextField's text property, like so: ... (more)

Job Interviews: Adobe Flex and Flash Career Guidance

Some things that I learned early in my career that originally helped me succeed, I believe are now hurting me in job interviews. One of the pros to typing via dynamic languages and forgiving compilers such as ActionScript 1.0, Ruby, JavaScript, and others is that you can quickly code things that work. In a lot of the early agency, multimedia, and small software company work that I did, these technologies were great. They didn't get in your way, and they empowered you to quickly create programmatic solutions that were enhanced or even driven by good designers. You could hit insane... (more)

Agile Chronicles #1: What is Agile Based On?

Preface Five weeks ago, I started a project with  Enablus, a firm that works with mainly startups to build products. I loathe service work, and love product work, so am really glad to be working with them. Even better, they are only 30 minutes from my house. I don’t really need to go more than 2 to 3 times a week, but I like how close they are when I do. One thing that struck me in the initial project discussions was that Enablus was really big on process and lingo. Darrell Ross, the project manager and partner I’m working with, although hard to read initially, still showed sign... (more)