I’m so glad I came to this conference. It was almost a last time decision, but I can tell you now that I won’t loose one more.

The are 4 reasons for that.

Reason 1: The people

Let’s face it. This is the main reason I go to conferences. Meet new people and most of all hang with guys that you keep seeing at this events. Some of them are already friends. And that’s the beauty of our job. You always talk with bright minds and really nice persons.

Reason 2: The conference

The speakers line up was another reason, of course. I mean, there was Joshua Davis,  Tom Beddard, Keith Peters, Grant Skinner… You can see them all here.

Reason 3: Marc

Marc Thiele is the conference’s curator. And if someone deserves your support, he’s the guy. A true genuine person who do what he’s doing for pure passion. I met him the first time at the Blackberry Dev Conf, in Amsterdam, and he’s a kind of guy that engages you since minute one. It was a true pleasure to see him again and be present at his conference. In a way, it’s a way to help.

Reason 4: The city

Cologne really surprised me. What a beautiful city… I could easily live in here. It somehow reminds me Lisbon.  There’s something in it you can’t explain by words, just with feelings. I am now lunching at the Brüsseler Platz, and this place has an atmosphere so creative, so chill out, so simple, so beautiful.

Wrapping up

A lot of what I’ve heard made me think. Merely, it was technology issues. As a designer and coder, I always try to use the best technology my users need. Always in a user point of view. I dont care what’s trendy, just on what it works. But the fact is that the industry is changing. Like it or not, the role of Flash as a technology is loosing space. Joshua Davis leaved Flash for Processing and Grant Skinner is being commissioned by Adobe to produce Javascript tools for Flash. And they were two of the biggest “Flash unofficial evangelists”. But has they all said, this is just a tool. To me, as a designer, the important is the message, not how you deliver it.

I hope next year the quality of the conference maintains the same or even better. I won’t loose it. And you shouldn’t also.

my flckr set

At this time, everyone has probably heard the sad news. Hillman Curtis has passed away…
But I didn’t came here to talk about his death. I came to talk about his life.

The first time I saw him personally was at the OFFF Festival in 2007. Oh man, what an inspiration he was at that time (already). I remember seeing the Movement Study movie he made and just be… wow… But the first thing that made me never forget about him was his will to get out of his confort zone. He went from graphic and webdesigner in his early days to became film maker ’till his last days. And he started because he wanted to. For the majority of the common mortals, it’s not an easy switch. Basically it’s a “start from scratch” situation. But he embraced change. And won.

In my talks I always mention him and particularly one situation on one of his Artist Series films. I heard this from Hillman itself. He was interviewing Mark Romanek for his film and they were trying to find the better place to shoot. Mark chose a wall full of pinned pictures and Hillman followed with a natural question: “The pictures must mean a lot to you”, wich Mark answered: “Sometimes theres no other reason to put something on the wall than it’s beautiful”. You can not imagine how this simple answer drived me through al this years… We, as designers, are always searching for answers and justifications and sometimes forget that there are some things that don’t have an answer, just a feeling attached to them.

Here are the slide. Enjoy!

UPDATE:

I’ve decided to remove my slides because I was invited to give more talks on this theme. The only reason is that some of the exercises only work in a surprise scenario

Another year, another victory.

The 2012 gotoAndSki(); edition went as expected: awesome. Networking, fun, snow, friendship, geekness, talks, all of that was present in this great conference. Like in last year’s edition, everything went smoothly and we all ended up enjoying it.

Once again, congratulations to Fernando and David for putting up a different and great conference. I’m looking forward to be at gotoAndSki(); 2013!

The speakers

As usual, a lot of great speakers.

Tom Krcha gaves us another insights of what’s happening with Flash and gaming. After met him at the last Flash Camp Portugal, it was nice to be with him again and see some crazy games that Stage3D can deliver. Whoever thought that Flash is dead, be prepared.

Mihai Corlan talk was made in a great mood. He shared what he think a great developer must do to master the mobile apps world. And some of his tips gave us new perspectives and a will to do more stuff.

Michael Plank started the second day. His knowledge of how to build interactive 3D games was superb. A walk through of all the process of a game was also showed, from artwork to code. One of my favorite sessions.

The first time I saw Mario Klingemann was at OFFF in 2006. Since then, he kept two things the same way. His aspect and his love for programming and mathematic. I mean, this guy doesn’t get old! After a time where he didn’t went to conferences as a speaker, it was a real pleasure to see him again. He showed us what he’s been working on: a skin detection mechanism. And he also showed some boobs. Not his, of course. Just a prove of concept of what skin is.

Steven Peeters showed us the power of ORM. Want to know more about this? Check it out here.

With “Simple P2P with Flash & Flex for the common mortal”, Peter Elst talk was really about that: making things easy. Of course, “easy” to this guy is build some libraries and provide some open source code to the community Thanks Peter!

Eugene Zatepyakin is what I call a fucked up mind. In a good way The algorithms he’s been working on “just for fun” are… well, I think that only Mario understood the numbers behind the work. In his spare time he’s developing a mechanism of image recognition. A kind of augmented reality but with images instead of a geometric figures. It sounds simple, but believe me, it’s not. He’s young, so I can not imagine what the future will bring to him. I’m sure we’ll hear about him in a future

Dominic Graefen moved recently to the Bay Area, so chat with him about that was always awesome. He’s the kind of guy that can fool anyone. Looking at him, you’ll probably think that he’s just a skater boy, or whatever. But when he starts coding… get out of his way! His talk was about what he think a productive developer should be and done. His experience give him the knowledge ro know that, for sure.

My talk

This year I had a different role. I was there as a speaker. I must admit that in the first minutes I was surprisingly nervous. I mean, in the audience were some of the best developers I ever met. And there I was, talking about creativity. But after the initial feelings, everything went as planned

Every year there’s a non-tech talk, and this year it was me who tried to put the geek minds to think different with “Hello Ideas”. Creativity, ideas, brainstorming, creative techniques… Those were the main items of my session. I’ve also made some creative exercises, witch produced some funny results. And at the end, the brainstorming session gathered all I spoke in the first half of the talk.

The final feedback was awesome, so I was happy Thanks everyone.

Active Media sponsorship

My former agency was also present as a sponsor. As always, they try to be upfront and it was very good to me to see them supporting the conference.

While working in there, I art directed the conference’s video trailer, wich was produced by João Madureira, Active Media in house motionographer, and the soundtrack was produced by David, the conference co-organizer. I think it ended up great with João and David putting all the pieces together is a perfect way  :)

See you next year?

Even if you are not related to the Flash world, if you’re a developer you really should be there next year. There’s a lot of things happening besides Flash. And of course, HTML5 is just around the corner So pack your bags, prepare your boards, and we’ll meet there in 2013!

Today I celebrate 1 month as a freelancer with this amazing “office” view. And the reason I say “celebrate” it’s because that’s what it really is: a celebration of life.

I’m having the fortune (or whatever you want to call it) of being working with awesome clients this past month wich is the base of what I consider a happy freelancer must be. And I’m happy, so thanks to them also

Through out this month I learned some valuable lessons. Some surprised me, others were a real revelation. None of them desapointed me. The everyday battle is to keep things like those. If you manage to do it, you’ll be fine.

Search your own happiness

That was my first lesson. I knew I’ll be happier, but not that much Although I was really happy in my last job (Active Media), it surprised me the ammount of income happiness you can achieve as a freelancer.
Everyday (or whenever I want) I lunch with my family, I spend a lot more time with my daughter and I see friends more often. And I’ve been working. A lot. So yeah, you can manage it.

Everyone should have an experience like this one

I now understand a lot more my former bosses. Running a businness it’s not easy. And that’s what you are: a businness.

No one will do the work for you, so you force yourself to say bye bye procastination. And that feels so good… The reason I say that everyone should have an experience like this one is simple. You face some things in your profession with another perspective. You have to. If you’re beeing lazy, you don’t get the job done. If you don’t get the job done, you disapoint clients. If you disapont clients, they’ll never work with you. If they’ll never work with you, you start to loose clients. And if you don’t have clients, you businness is over. That’s the hard truth.

So if you’re working in an agency, don’t forget: your laziness is your worst enemy, not your bosses. If the company looses clients, they will loose you.

If you don’t love your clients, you’ll not succeed

I never though I would like so much of the client management part of the job. I learn a lot with my my former boss to manage expectations and some client management tips. And I’m applying them.
Fact is, if you’re not good managing clients you will not be a good freelancer. So if that is not your thing, learn. There are a lot of resources on the web to help you with that, but my basic “secrets” are:

• Be nice. No one wants to work with an arrogant bastard.
• Don’t promisse what you can’t do. You’ll end up loosing your client.
• Don’t charge too little. Your price is your value. Remember that.
• Be a partner, not a monkey. You should see yourself as a partner of your client. Show new ideas, talk with him. If you’re just a monkey who codes or design, you’ll become disposable. And you don’t want that to happen.
• Break barriers. Try to loose the formal relationship with your client. When you start to be known by your name instead of your profession designation, your relation will last longer

I try to do it all. Not as a scam, but because I really believe in it. I will not work with a client that I don’t like. That’s not arrogance, it’s just a search for a happier life.

Life is good

Yeah, you can make your life good. As I read once, it’s really easy to be a sad person. You just have to do nothing. On the other side, it gives a lot of work to be happy. So it’s your choice and only yours. No one should be running your life, except you.

But the time has come. I’m going to be a full time freelancer.

Projects for the future? Tons of them. But let’s take one step at a time. I’m available for hiring from now on.

Now, lets rock & roll!

Although I’m not the author, I must share and record in this blog 5 topics that Brad talks in his article on Smashing Magazine:

1. Why is it important to convey this message? This speaks to purpose.
2. Where on the website should the message appear? This speaks to context.
3. Who is the audience? This speaks to the precision of the message.
4. What are we trying to say? This speaks to clarity.
5. How do we convey and sequence the information for maximum impact? This speaks to persuasiveness.

It’s with an extreme honor that I’ll be in this years Flash Camp Portugal as a speaker.

The event will be held this Saturday, December 3rd, at the Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon, so I expect you to show up if you’re in town.

I’ll be speaking about integrating WordPress and Flash in an easy and simple way and I will show how to do it. It could save you guys weeks of work, so I expect my experience will be any good for you.

This year we have a rock and solid panel. Manuel Barbosa, Paulo Moreira, Michael Chaize, Tom Krcha, Jean-Marc Le Roux, Tiago Dias, Fernando Colaço and Joshua Davis. You’ve heard it right. Joshua Davis will be closing the event

In a time that a lot of people says Flash is dead, it’s really important to show that it it’s not true. In fact, Flash is getting stronger in some areas, like gaming. It’s up to us to keep on moving and try to learn the best use to give to Flash. So let’s do it. Saturday is just one more day.

This was a great surprise. I was invited to speak next Thursday (3 November) on the second portuguese HTML5 community event.

My talk will be about <video>. Here’s the teaser:

HTML5 Video – The search for a perfect solution

In a time where “thousands” of video player solutions are being offered in the cloud, why build something from scratch instead of opting for one of them?

The answer is quite simple: because.

Besides an overall control on accessibility and usability of the mechanism, there’s the part of discovery and learning. And if the <video> tag is still young, nothing like spend some time so we can know each other better. Just like in other relationship.

So, there it is. Hope you feel motivated and join me in the event. André will be giving the other talk of the way, so I’m sure you will not regret it

More info about the event here.

UPDATE

This is the result in video (in portuguese).

It’s with great pleasure that I announce that in January 2012 I’ll be at gotoAndSki(‘Switzerland’); as a speaker

After spending some amazing days in last year conference, like I told in this post, it was with great joy that I got Fernando invitation to present the “non-geek” talk of the event. I called the talk “Hello Ideas” and it will be like this:

The developers mind it’s a case study by itself. It finds creativity where a common person only sees numbers and letters. But it can also be lazy. 1+1 will always be 2.

That’s the pattern this talk wants to break. Sometimes 1+1 can be 3. Why not?More than a talk, “Hello Ideas” aims do be a collaborative brainstorming session where the speaker and the attendees will interact in the quest of getting better and different ideas.With the objective of giving mental tools and processes, we will be talking about different styles of brainstorming and how each one fits better in each individual or group scenario.With an audience composed on its majority by geeks and ‘technical’ attendees, tools and methods will be given to learn how not to kill an idea. This is an important aspect in a developers brain. Instead of asking in a first stage if it’s possible to build the idea, he should let it roll. One step at a time.How can we develop creative and imaginative solutions to business problems?
How can I do this if I’m a freelancer and work alone?
How can I generate ideas in a team environment?
In the end, all these questions will have an answer. And most important, the attendees will see that sometimes 1+1 is 3. Hello ideas.

There’s a portuguese version of this article in the Active Media blog.