A day in the life of a senior flash developer

Matt Leathes is one of our senior flash developers here at Epic. Below is an account of a day in his life…

My day as senior flash developer starts once I'm fully caffiene'd up (as is traditional in the programming industry).
I then begin my day by sorting out which of my programmers will be working on our current projects, ensuring they know what tasks they're expected to achieve and that they have everything they need to complete those tasks. Frequently this will involve liasing with the Lead Designer and Art Director to make sure they're aware of what they need to give to the programmer.

Then it's a case of going through all the projects that I look after (usually about 6), making sure that a developer has been booked in to do the work at all the key stages of development.

After that, my day is mostly made up of fielding technical questions and explaining complex bits of code to my programmers; helping the artists put together their animations in such a way that they'll 'plug-in' to our flash e-learning engine correctly; giving advice to designers as to what is and isn't possible in Flash, and how long their designs will take to develop. Other than that I can be found going to the many meetings (my least favourite part of the job) that are required when starting any new project; advising the Sales people on whether to choose Flash or HTML on the projects they're pitching for; helping fix complex bugs in projects that are on the go; briefing testers on what needs testing on any project; and somehow attempting to find the time to code the programming tasks that I've assigned to myself!

I also recently seem to have become the company's 'Mac Guru' so end up fielding a lot of questions about how things work in Mac OS X these days too.

Apart from being maniacally busy some days, it's a great job on the whole as I get to work with pretty much every team in the company and it's constantly challenging. You know they say 'you learn something new every day'? Well I learn 20 new things every day!

Outside of work I'm involved with FlashCodersBrighton, which is a group of Flash designers and developers who meet up every other week to share knowledge and info about best practices and new features in Flash.
Most of the Flash companies in Brighton work on Flash games so the meetings are heavily skewed in that direction, but it's still interesting and relevant and Flash game developers are generally the ones pushing the Flash player to its absolute limits so tend to find out about its limitations and bugs a lot sooner that those of us who work in e-learning.
They also have more scope to play around with the latest versions of the code and Flash player whereas we're generally restricted to the lowest version our clients have installed (usually version 6) so it gives me a great heads up on some of the new features coming out that I wouldn't ordinarily get the chance to play with.
There's also lots of talks about upcoming Flash-related technologies such as Flex and Apollo that are always really useful to keep an eye on to see if they can offer us new solutions to present to our clients.
The group meetings are also the one form of social gathering where I can talk about my job without it sounding like complete gobbledegook to those listening - in fact it's often the other way round and I find myself completely lost amidst talk of scalars and vectors, z-index sorting, texture mapping and quaternion matrix transformations!
I haven't yet been a presenter at one of these meetings, except to talk briefly about the techniques I used in the few games I have built, but I will be talking about implementing SCORM in Flash-based e-learning at some point in the near future.