Michael Novotnymanovotny

Breaking Up With Flash

I started working with Adobe Flash in 2006. I owe a lot to Flash. It shaped my career for six years and paid for our wedding, our house, two cars, and two kids. I have immense gratitude and respect for the platform.

But things change, especially in technology. Today is bittersweet. Today I'm officially breaking up with Flash, for good.

Adobe Flash

The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript landscape was a different world six years ago. Remember slicing an image into nine pieces to get rounded corners? That kind of frustration made Flash an easy choice. Draw a rounded rectangle on the stage and you're done. Immediate gratification.

I paid $100 for a screencast course on Advanced Flash Website Development. The rest is history.

I spent about a year building simple Flash websites, then moved on to advanced Flash applications. Flash was never meant to build websites or applications, but the community took it there anyway. Adobe responded with Adobe Flex — still Flash at its core, wrapped in a far richer framework. Flex made Flash a viable enterprise platform, and it took off.

Flex gave me the chance to work with some of the best rich internet application (RIA) companies in the world. Learning to architect complex web apps was invaluable, and I'm thankful I got to do it alongside some of the best developers in the industry.

The beginning of the end, for me, came in 2010, when Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Flash. That single article is responsible for the current technology landscape, and for the split between Google's perspective and Apple's.

Most of my colleagues fell into the Google camp out of allegiance to Flash. I took Steve's article as a wake-up call. Continuing to invest my career in a dead or dying language would've been irresponsible, so I spent my free time learning other technologies.

Over the next two years, Steve Jobs was proven right. In the fall of 2011, Adobe announced their intention to open source the Flex SDK, which I read as, "We're done with Flash, too". Their attempt at a FAQ a few days later confirmed it. They're done, and shifting focus to HTML5. My decision to transition felt validated.

This turn of events led me to WordPress and the more traditional web stack of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

HTML5 and CSS3 have emerged in the wake of this post-Flash era with strong momentum. In my 11 years of development (I know that's not long), I've never seen an acceleration like the one we're in right now. But look at what exists today that didn't two or three years ago. Entire industries and livelihoods, birthed in a blink:

It's an exciting time to be a developer, and learning in my free time wasn't enough. It's time for a change.

December 31st, 2012 marked my last day as a Flash developer, and it feels good to say that.

So what's next? I'm turning my focus to UI/UX, frontend development (web and mobile), and building on what I already know — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Objective-C.

2013 will be a year of learning, new opportunities, and growth. I never imagined I'd be where I am today as a developer. Flash played an important part in that, and I'm grateful. But it's time to move on, and I can't wait to see how it turns out.