Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Am I too late to get feedback?

So I'm late to the game. Its taken me a long time to spin up my blog, but with a bit of a new focus in my job, I realized its time. So here it is...my entry into the blogosphere.

But if you have found your way here and don't already know me, then you are probably asking yourself, in the immortal words of Admiral James Stockdale, who am I and why am I here? So I'll explain that, and I'm definitely hoping for better results than the Admiral's.

I've been working at iterations of Adobe since early 2000, starting with Allaire, then on to Macromedia, and since December of 2005, at Adobe. Before that I spent time at Powersoft, Sybase, Silverstream and IBM. So I've been thinking about and working with developers a lot over the past 15 years, and specifically working on developer relations over the past 15 months or so.

And in the last month or so, I've started to focus even more deeply on developers, specifically around the area of developer programs. So it clearly became time to blog, not only to share some insight into things we are thinking about, things we are working to better support developers, but to use this blog as a way to get your opinions, feedback and ideas.

So with that, yes I'm late to the game, but I'm here. And while I'm thrilled to have comments welcoming me to the blogosphere if anyone wants to do that, more than anything I want to kick this off by getting input from people that develop applications with Adobe technology. What do you think --what does Adobe need to do to provide better support for developers? Is it better content, more community connections, easier ability to find code, etc? All ideas and suggestions are welcome.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Better late than never.

Welcome to the blogosphere!

Mike

Unknown said...

Welcome, Jonathan!
The blogosphere's a forgiving place- as Mike said- better late than never. Look forward to following your posts!

Anonymous said...

Welcome to blogsphere

I hope everything will be very closed to the developers.

a Maximum lucky to the blog.

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to hearing more from you on this blog. Best of luck!

Dan Wilson said...

Hi Jonathan,

I've been working with ColdFusion for the last 7 years and Flex for the last year. I can say that the model for developers in the ColdFusion space is awesome. With the plethora of open sourced code (RIAForge, CFLib.org etc), bloggers such as Ray Camden, Sean Corfield and the like, and the various tools and frameworks available, the developer community in ColdFusion is awesome.

Flex, is coming into its own. With Flex.org, the FlexCoders list and other resources, a critical mass is developing. I am personally pleased with the outreach from Adobe. I think you are doing a great job making the tools and skills for these products accessible.

Jonathan Wall said...

Thanks all for the super fast warm welcome....

Raymond Camden said...

Welcome! If you want to leave this blog platform for a ColdFusion one, I happen to know a good open source solution. ;)

Anonymous said...

The labs.adobe.com is the greatest concept for developers since sliced bread. Please make every effort to not let this die. Same goes for MXNA.

Encourge Adobe to support more events like 360Flex, this was great.

Jonathan Wall said...

Thanks Ray. I was looking for something really simple to use, and blogger/blogspot seemed to do the trick. Regardless, your open source and other community efforts are really appreciated and noticed.

Jonathan Wall said...

Thanks Jerry. It turns out that Dan Taborga on my team actually runs Labs, and we're committed to keeping it going for a long time. 360Flex is great, and Ted Patrick, John Wilker and Tom Ortega get all the credit there. And we're thrilled that there are so many community conferences out there, not just 360Flex, but lots more on Flex, Flash, ColdFusion and lots of other good stuff. Its really amazing how hard the community works to share info with folks...

Anonymous said...

Hey Jonathan -- it's awesome (wicked awesome even :) to see you doing this. Re: feedback...In all honesty? For starters, keep doing what you're doing. You and your team have done a great job showing Adobe how it's done when it comes to community relations. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to watching this blog, and I promise I'll pass along more constructive feedback when I have it :)

Unknown said...

Hi Jonathan,
You're not late, just making a graceful entrance!
Having been around the block for a number of years in the programming culture, I can say that my somewhat recent conversion to Adobe (~ 1 year now and going strong) has been the most enjoyable and enriching learning experience by far.
One of the many best things that makes working with all the Adobe products has been the insightful and enlightening blog posting by the community and by the people like you that are on the inside looking out.
I'm looking forward to hearing more from your blog!

Anonymous said...

Just wanted to say a huge thanks for what you and your team (especially, Ed and Christine) continue to do in supporting the Adobe Community of Developers. It's going to be hard to top what you guys are already doing. Hmmm... about the only thing left that I can think of... can I work for you? :-))

Thanks again,

Mike Givens

Anonymous said...

There's a ton of support available, but I have the impression (others might disagree) that you have to work for it. For example, people who are new to the formerly-Macromedia family probably never notice the "Add Comment" button at the bottom of all the doc pages, and don't realize the LiveDocs is just that--live. I've made just a couple comments, but gotten very prompt responses from the docs team in each case.

Flexcoders is wonderful but, with 120 message per day, it can be intimidating. For every question I get an answer to by posting a question there, I answer three or four by just searching the archives--but again, does everybody do so?

The quick starts, doc links and other resources are great as well, but without a dedicated support plan new developers can feel a little bit thrown to the wolves. I guess my overall (belated) suggestion is to add extra focus on new developer support and retention.

Good luck :)

- Chris

Jonathan Wall said...

Thanks Chris. This is great input. Really helpful. Keep it coming.