For the past 3 years I’ve worked for an online Training Management Software company called Mindflash.  Originally based in Santa Barbara, I joined a team of 14 talented individuals as a Flash/Flex Developer and began contributing my Flash/Actionscript expertise on the front-end Flash-based player that displayed and controlled a wide variety of content converted to Flash.

In a very short period of time, I jumped into just about every other aspect of the software. I wrote AS2 byte code that allowed for animated-GIF support in our PowerPoint to Flash conversion.  I wrote code that detected various third party SWF formats and properly took over any controls they contained.  I wrote C# and C++ that helped speed up conversion of Powerpoint documents and properly took care of any embedded audio/video files, making it so that they could easily be swapped out by the user at a later time and no longer required them to wait to reconvert the entire document.

A few months after I started, we began work on a new version of the product (the current software that is on the market).  I was tasked with doing research as to what technology was going to be used.  I created a prototype of one of the main pieces of functionality using Flex Builder (now Flash Builder).  The prototype was a success and we decided to use Flex as our primary front end technology.

Once that decision was made, I worked extensively with Flex/Flash Builder and assisted in helping other team members (the team was primarily .Net) learn Flex.  I worked very closely with the product team to develop new designs and to act as a liaison between the Product and Development teams.

As the dev team grew, we became more and more serious about our Agile practices and began to split into multiple smaller teams, with a different Agile Scrum meeting for each team.  A teammate and I were tasked with growing our engineering department by aiding in the interview/hiring process to find the best and brightest Flex developers from all over the country.

Working on Mindflash has resulted in my Flex and overall front end development skills improving drastically.  I gained a firm grasp on MVC and Flex frameworks, and learned a good amount about writing testable code and best practices.  I worked on functionality large and small, and contributed my extreme attention to detail and my strong design background to help create the experience that Mindflash has become.

Check out Mindflash.com and start a trial (free of charge, no credit card info required) to see what I’ve been doing for the past few years.