It really has been an honor and privilege to support you. And fun, too.
I think it was at my third meeting, back in ‘03, that I told you I was a designer, not a programmer. Much of the first meetings’ content went right over my head. But, I continued to attend. At the next meeting I attended, Tim Brady demoed importing images dynamically using load vars. It was an eye-opener. I got it! Then, one evening outside of DIHMA, our soon-to-be first Iron Flasher, Noah Dziobecki pointed out that learning ActionScript was as simple as learning the syntax.
Many, many more presentations including those from Sam Rivello, Colin Moock, Troy Gardener, Patrick Ortiz, Chris Georgenes, Susan Oslin on XML, Warren Fuller, Robert Reinhardt, Jacob Bullock (LAFO), Elliot Mebane (LAFX) and of course, yours truly, our fearless leader: R Blank and so many, many others. With each meeting I attended, I grew…as the community grew, as the technology grew. I also often found help and got valuable feedback from our once very active community forum.

Today, I can call myself a designer and developer! Thanks to LA Flash.

I volunteered to edit the newsletter to give back to this wonderful community that taught me so much. That responsibility grew to add Publisher Relations and then I was named Co-Manager.

Yes, it’s been an honor and privilege to give back to this incredible, talented community that you built, R. I have been honored to get to know some of the amazing people in our community and made lasting friendships.

I owe thanks to the precedent set by my predecessors, Stephanie Warner, Elliot Mebane and of course, the unflappable, jovial support of Jonathon Menendez. I also want to thank my dear friend, the talented Brian Zick for introducing me to LA Flash and you. I also thank this amazing LA Flash community.

This all comes down to just two words, R—thank you. Without you, we surely wouldn’t have come this far.

Please stay in touch.

You are an inspiration. Many blessings and good luck on your new adventures. Thank you for making impossible dreams possible and for bringing the people together.

First a HUGE deeply appreciated thank you, for the amazing living community that probably wouldn’t exist without your epic quest for the perfect party meets presentation, that LA Flash and events like Flashapalooza has become. While I’ve never been able to attend or present as much as I would have liked, I have gotten a lot out of attending and occasionally presenting. I’ll never forget my first time with papervision with John Grden teaching, or Grant Skinner doing colored ping pong ball motion tracking, or Puck running around, or losing the feeling in my fingers during a cold winter session. Leslie making sure everything was running smoothly and your big booming voice in the front of the room, almost as if in a spotlight.

I can’t tell you how much of your post in the arc has been mirrored in my own, even though we walk very different lives.

I think we got started in LA in similar times. I too went through that educational process with every client, of what flash was. So much ignorance and hatred (Flash is that stupid thing I have to click skip to get to the real content).

Now it’s what many people want. It’s pretty much behind every video, most of the successful banner ads, the most engaging movie sites, and so many applications and widgets that push the edge of what the web is and is still years ahead of what the basic standards (e.g. HMTL 5.0) will do without the deep headaches of cross browser compatibilities. The second largest search site is youtube, which is largely pushed flash and video on the web into commodities (outside the iphone..)

I find that the industry has so far surpassed those days it boggles my mind. There were about 200 people in the Adobe multi-touch event at Adobe MAX 2009. Multitouch is off the shelf, you can go to best buy and get a $80 tablet, with Flash player 10 and start playing with gestures, when I was studying it in 2000, you needed a MIT lab, and tens of thousands of dollars and a C++ compiler to do anything. I haven’t even touched the mobile space.

It used to be most projects could be done by 1-3 was good, now projects require teams of 5-15, where everybody lives mostly in 1 tool.

When I started there were no real frameworks to speak of and those that first came were out of desparation because Flash didn’ t have zip…, now at least 2 new ones come out a year, for the sake of fun!

I too feel like, “my job here is done”, and the pressure from running 99% mental CPU’s for going on a decade straight.

I must say this is a watershed event for the Flash community,
As you may or may not know, Sam Rivello is moving on from LA,
I am winding down my flash consultancy in the next few months in favor of growing companies and products of my own. I can’t help but wonder who will replace us, but I do look forward to seeing it! there is so much talent here, and so much that doesn’t happen any place else.

Troy.

P.S. You should also check out mindshare la, you have similar values in the types of events you want to put on.

Looking forward to seeing what your next steps are.