I haven’t been blogging like I used to. It’s been a month since my last post (and that was just a silly cartoon). I’ve been thinking about why this is, and there are some typical expected reasons (busy work schedule, extra non-work commitments, a recent move, etc etc). This is all part of why I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon, but it’s not the whole story. This post is a bit of a dive into my psychology, trying to get at why I blog and where I’m trying to get to in my life. This isn’t a technical post and it’s not really even about Flex. It’s about me and my brain and my feelings. So if you don’t like mushy crap, you can stop reading.<\/p>\n
First, the standard stuff:<\/p>\n
So that’s all the stuff that I’d tell you if you asked me why I haven’t been blogging. “Man, I’ve just been so busy, I can’t find the time.” There’s a lot of truth to that, I certainly don’t want it to sound like I haven’t been busy. But largely the “I’ve been busy” excuse is bullshit. So why haven’t I been blogging? <\/p>\n
I’m not hungry anymore.<\/strong><\/p>\n Now we’re getting to the meat of this. I’ve been thinking about what drives me to blog and reflecting on the past year and a half. I’ve had a crazy ride. I went from being an unknown kid learning ActionScript and Flex to being a semi-famous-within-a-very-specific-geek-circle, book-writing, highly-paid, influential expert (and yeah, clearly you can tell that it’s all gone to my head). And it all happened in a year. My salary multiplied, I was speaking at conferences, I had a book deal. That’s some seriously crazy shit. That wasn’t entirely my plan from day one, although as things started picking up steam I started aiming higher and higher. I wanted to be famous. I wanted people to think I was good. I wanted to be in demand, to be sought after. <\/p>\n And so now what? What’s the next step? I’ve got a stellar job, I make bank, my book’s about to come out, I’ve got a reputation I’m proud of, and I’m being flown halfway around the world to speak at a conference. The people that I thought were rockstars, that I learned so much from while I was getting started (and still do every day); they all know who I am now (some of them are even good friends). <\/p>\n I used to be so hungry to prove myself. If someone had a coding problem they couldn’t solve I wanted to be the guy who showed everyone how to do it. I wanted people to stop and say “woah, where the fuck did this guy come from?” And now that I got that I guess I feel a bit drained. That fire to be the best, to be known, is dampened. I’m not saying I’m the best, I’m just saying I no longer care like I used to.<\/p>\n The Tech<\/strong> I’m not ditching Flex or ActionScript. On the contrary, I feel like I’ve gotten to the point with the technology that I’m supposed to be: Flex and ActionScript are just tools to solve problems, not problems in themselves. When I started blogging Flex was a problem I was chipping away at, hacking together examples and tweaking the framework to get it to serve my needs. Now I want to move beyond that, and take on problems that are information problems on their own, and Flex just happens to be the best tool I have at my disposal.<\/p>\n The Next Step<\/strong> So in the months ahead I hope to use this blog as an experimental proving ground for my forays into data visualization. I’m doing a lot of this for work, which is awesome because that means I get paid to do interesting work, but it has the downside that I often can’t share code. I imagine there will be more posts that are examples of what we’ve done (videos or live apps) that don’t show exactly how we did it. That sucks, but I think there’s still a lot to be said for showing off inspirational stuff. I’m also going to be trying to refocus on blogging small experiments in data visualization. <\/p>\n So if you’ve made it this far I’m impressed you read through my psycho-babble ramblings (or maybe you just skipped to the end looking for something worthwhile). From here on out I’ll probably keep the “dive into Doug’s head” type of posts like this to a minimum, and get back to blogging cool tech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I haven’t been blogging like I used to. It’s been a month since my last post (and that was just a silly cartoon). I’ve been thinking about why this is, and there are some typical expected reasons (busy work schedule, extra non-work commitments, a recent move, etc etc). This is all part of why I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
\nThere’s also a technology aspect to this. I’m starting to feel like I’ve taken Flex as far as it will go. I started proving small things; how to make little components, or how to hack some piece of the Flex framework. And I rode that until I knew Flex inside and out. I hit every brick wall (I climbed over or busted through some). And it was all so challenging and rewarding. I was unlocking secrets, uncovering things people didn’t know. But in terms of intellectual curiosity I’ve exhausted Flex 2 and 3. Of course there’s always new stuff in Flash Player 10 and Flex 4 that is going to be really interesting. But my interest has been shifting. I don’t want to solve small problems with a component or with a framework. I want big problems. I want new problems. I want real problems. I want to solve something that’s not just a technical detail. <\/p>\n
\nI’ve been reading a good bit about information visualization as a field of research and soaking in as much as I can. The product I’ve been working on for Universal Mind takes geographic information visualization to a level that nobody’s done yet on the web (I put the “on the web” qualifier there, but I hope we’re working on stuff that pushes limits for any software, online or offline). And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s a ton room for innovation in the geo space. It’s a field that has so much potential but is stifled by a few big players and their ideas about how things are supposed to work. So I’m hoping I can help shake that up a bit. But geospatial information is just one small piece of the whole pie. I want to visualize everything. I want to create new ways of seeing data. And this is a field without limits. There is no end to the possible innovation.<\/p>\n