Back in Black - Returning to Platform Evangelism at Adobe
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Published
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
at
1:29 PM
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I am very excited to return to the Platform Evangelism team at Adobe to pursue my passion of writing and exploring the world of software development.
I started writing software at age 9 on an Apple II+ at our neighbors house in Houston, Texas and if it hadn't been for my grandfather buying me an Apple IIE, I might have moved into our neighbors house. I love software, I love writing it, learning new things about it, and I especially love sharing what I learn about it with others. It is an interesting time to return to evangelism as the Flash Platform is in the midst of a very large transition. We are in the middle of Flex 4 development, progress on Catalyst, Mobile runtimes, and Flash Collaboration Services are full steam ahead. In the overall market, RIA purpose driven apps are going mainstream vs traditional browser based apps. I don't go to Twitter.com, I use Destroy Twitter; I don't go to Facebook.com, rather I have an app for that on my phone; and services/apis are appearing for just about everything. Times have changed.
For the last 12 months I have worked on the community team at Adobe focused on growing our designer and developer ecosystem through our community leaders and Adobe User Groups. The community has grown dramatically over the past year and I want to thank each and every community leader who made that growth possible. Although our work is far from complete, I know that the passionate leadership within the community merged with new team leadership under Rachel Luxemburg (New Team Leader) & Ben Forta (Evangelism Honcho) can only result in a world class program for Adobe in the years ahead. Long story short community is in great hands. The year of management experience has been eye opening for me as I had to learn a very different toolset, and honestly, I could not have asked for a better team.
During my time on the community team I started writing software in my spare time. I would stay up late to writing code and learn new platforms. I certainly didn't see it initially but after my wife Linda mentioned it, I really needed to make writing and exploring software my full time job. So today I am headed back to the Evangelism team to pursue that passion.
I was chatting with Ryan Stewart today on IM and this chat sums up my feeling well:
12:00:56 PM Ted Patrick: tis humbling to return to evangelism
12:01:00 PM Ryan Stewart: hahah
12:01:02 PM Ryan Stewart: why?
12:01:06 PM Ryan Stewart: you were the Flex evangelist king!
12:01:12 PM Ryan Stewart: now you're back in black
12:01:24 PM Ted Patrick: oh just after all the projects
12:01:34 PM Ted Patrick: and management
12:01:45 PM Ted Patrick: It is nice to return to code
Well I am not sure about "Flex evangelist king", yikes, but I am very happy to be back. It is an amazing team and there is no better job for someone that loves software development.
Cheers,
Ted :)