Duane Nickull

AS Heroes Interviews — By PabloP on April 23, 2010 at 23:27

http://technoracle.blogspot.com

Duane Nickull

- How would you introduce yourself and your job to a non-technical person?
I am a Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe as well as the host of the popular Adobe TV show Duane’s World. The title doesn’t translate very well into other languages. You can basically interpret it as “someone who is fanatically religious about cool technology”. As for Duane’s World, it really gives me freedom to express myself through video, audio and technical channels while getting to hang out with many cool developers and architects.

- How did you get started with Flash?
I was really bad at Flash when I tried some of the early tools from Macromedia. In fact, I found the whole “timeline” thing very confusing. When my boss from Adobe asked me to try Flex Builder when Adobe was in the process of acquiring Macromedia, it just clicked. I remember sitting in the audience at one of Mike Chambers talks and building my first real applications. It was infectious and I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to use ActionScript to solve all the world’s problems.

- Who or what is your inspiration?
I look to Johnny Rotten and Henry Rollins as my primary role models for speaking their truth. I also admire my feisty 96 year old grandmothers who are more punk rock than most mohawk clad kids. For ActionScript, Grant Skinner, Andre Michele and Alan Queen are kings of the code for me. For what it’s worth, I think we can learn from all developers though. There are so many ways to do things with Flash Builder that no one person has all the right answers. Keeping open eyes to see what others are doing is key.

- What does a typical day look like for you?
I work at home and also travel a lot so there is no typical day for me. Every day brings a new adventure. In 2009 I traveled more than 320,000 KM (last 3 years were all over 300,000) to speak at events, conferences, industry events, filming for Duane’s World, teaching at Universities and more.

- What are your thoughts about the Flash community, what do you like or what would you like to see change?
The Flash community is awesome. I’ve met tons of very cool people in this arena and love to have drinks with them, go out for dinners, parties etc. Everyone brings so much excitement. What I would love to see change is the perceived divisions between “Flash” and “Flex” developers. Hey – we all play on the same team!

- How do you see the future for yourself and for the Flash Platform?
My future involves music, video, Flash and the community around it. There are a lot of parallels between the Flash ecosystem and being a professional musician (I’ve always hated the term “rock star” and preferred to be called a “professional guitarist” instead). I want to bring these two passions together along with snowboarding, skateboarding and cycling. Life couldn’t be better.

I’m also stoked to see how the ecosystem evolves onto mobile. All the big enterprise companies are on board for bringing Flash to mobile for businesses. RIM, Google, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Palm and many more who have most of the enterprise market share are working within the Open Screen Project to use Flash as the runtime for business applications. This is going to be a wild ride over the next few years.

I am also really excited about HTML5 as it brings more functionality to the web. I think it has been far too long since HTML evolved and Adobe in general is really stoked about this.

For the short term, I am excited that it is Friday afternoon and I will be sitting with my band mates (http://www.22ndcenturyofficial.com) in hour studio having a beer in less than two hours!

Life is good!

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