Derek Wischusen: Developer spotlight

Derek was selected by the community for our first Developer Spotlight for his work with Flex and Ruby on Rails.

Derek is a Senior Manager of Electronic Products at Wolters Kluwer Health, where he manages and leads the development of Flex and Flash-based products. Derek has been creating applications using the Flash platform since 2000 and Rails since early 2006. He runs a blog on using Flex with Ruby on Rails, and he helps run the Flex side of the Philly Flash Platform Users Group.

In the following interview, we asked Derek a bit about his background and vision.

What Adobe technologies are you currently using?

I primarily use Flex 2.  For my job I sometimes have to some work with Flash 8 or Dreamweaver, but I try to stick to using Flex as much as possible.

What is your most recent project you’ve built using Adobe technologies?

My publicly available projects include:

•  The Flex Ruby on Rails SDK that I worked on with Mike Potter.
  http://code.google.com/p/rubyonrails-ria-sdk-by-adobe/
• A very simple issue tracker application that was the basis for a series of tutorials that I wrote on Flex, Cairngorm, and WebORB for Rails.
  http://flexonrails.net/?p=34
• An application that uses Flex, Rails, and RMagick to convert images from one format to another online. http://flexonrails.net/imageconverter
• An application based on Peter Baird's Style Explorer that can be used to style a Flex app and save the CSS http://flexonrails.net/stylescreator/public/

What about Adobe technology excites you, inspires you, or makes you say, "Wow that’s really cool"?

That Flex makes it insanely easy to create rich, DRY, data-driven interfaces that can be delivered on the web and/or on the desktop (via Apollo).

Where do you get your information about technology?

• OriginalSignal http://web20.originalsignal.com/
• Ruby on Rails blog http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/
• MXNA Aggregator http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/
• Slashdot http://slashdot.org/
• Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/

What are some of your favorite websites or blogs?

• Ryan Stewart's blog http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/
  
• Has many through http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/
  
• Zed Shaw's blog http://www.zedshaw.com/
  
• Why the Lucky Stiff's site http://whytheluckystiff.net/
• Topfunky.com http://topfunky.com/        

What is your favorite or most useful electronic gadget that you own?

My favorite electronic gadget is probably my Prius.

What’s the one thing you’d love to see in Adobe technologies in the future?

Adobe could open source all of their developer technologies (including Live Cycle Data Services and Flash Media Server), and work towards making AMF and RTMP open standards.  I would LOVE that.  Other than that I would like to see Adobe focus developing productivity frameworks and RAD tools that make it even easier to quickly create compelling RIAs.

If you could build something you considered revolutionary, what would it be?

A tool or framework that makes it possible to develop richer applications with less code.  The easier it is for developers to create compelling applications the more revolutionary applications there will be.