A few months ago, Adobe approached us to get some feedback on Flex 4 and Catalyst and how they would fit into our design and development workflow (our workflow was recently covered by Forrester, if you're interested). Rather than just providing anecdotal feedback, we built out a real application without taking any shortcuts in our approach. To that end, we have just announced the first ever Adobe Flex 4 and Catalyst application called Cynergy.Congress. This application allows you to learn about United States members of Congress, including their terms, policies, committees, recent news and even videos of their testimony on the floor of the House or Senate.

I know I am aggregated by some tech-centric blog aggregators and if all I was passing along was a link to a Flex application, that wouldn't interest a lot of you. Well, as Dave Wolf announced in his blog entry, we will also be releasing the source code in the coming days so that you can download, explore, and extend the code to start getting familiar with the next version of Flex. Andy Trice, who is Cynergy's Principal Architect for Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, was the lead developer on the project, so I can promise you that nothing but the very best practices were used during development and this isn't simply demo-ware. He has already started posting about his experience with the project and it provides some great insight into the new workflows that Adobe is introducing with the next version of the Adobe Flash platform. Have a look!

Forrester has been trying to understand the rich Internet applications (RIAs) design and development process. While many firms like Cynergy have been doing this sort of development for so long that it seems like it's old hat, the fact of the matter is that building real applications with technologies like Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft WPF is still pretty new and lots of companies are trying to get their heads around how to set up a successful workflow. After a lot of research, Forrester essentially concluded that Cynergy's approach -- and what we have learned by approaching our projects this way -- is the template from which other firms should be modeling their workflows, and Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president has blogged a nice summary with a link to a free copy of the report (which usually goes for $750).

Now, I want to be very careful with the messaging here. I still (barely) maintain a separate blog from Cynergy's blogs because I don't want to be a shill for everything we do -- at least, not on my blog. :) That said, one thing I've learned in the time I've been at Cynergy is just how hard it is to set up a repeatable workflow for designing and developing successful RIAs. And by "successful RIAs" I mean real, enterprise-level applications upon which you can build your business. Trust me, if this workflow were that easy, a lot more people would be doing it, and it's one thing to do something once but another thing entirely to continually "rinse and repeat" it successfully.

I encourage you to check out the report and compare how we're building RIAs with how you're building them (or would like to). At 7 pages, it won't take more than 15-20 minutes of your time but it could provide insights into a process that will save you hundreds of hours down the line. Oh yeah, and if you'd like to see the output of having a sound process, check out CynergyTV for some examples of real apps built to solve real business needs.

So Dave, you mean you've spent the last year re-building CynergyTV? Nope, not quite. That was done by an extremely talented team here at Cynergy that worked extremely hard to not only refresh the user experience but deliver the content in professional audio/video quality supported by lots of hardware and software upgrades in our data center. Incidentally, when I say team, I mean it in the truest sense of the word -- our president, Carson Hager, recognizing that we could and should present our accomplishments better and allowing guys to stop being billable in order to get this done; our Marketing group spending hours in the recording studio choreographing the audio/video; our User Experience group iterating through lots of potential look and feel options until it was nailed; our Rich Interface team implementing the user experience in Adobe Flex; and finally, our Enterprise Services and Network Support teams building out the services tier to support the streaming video content (not a trivial task as I've come to learn), notifying the appropriate people when the Let's Talk form is submitted, and then setting up the appropriate infrastructure to host it all in our data center. If that sounds like a lot of work, that's because it was -- and it was well worth the investment.

So back to my opening question as to why I've been so quiet. Well, if you head over to CynergyTV (after reading this post, of course), you'll see that one of the showcases is for an application we built called Quickcomm Enterprise, a telecom expense management (TEM) tool for one of our clients, Quickcomm. It is this application that has basically been most of the last year of my life. As the Technical Lead on the project (which is a combination senior application architect and project manager here at Cynergy), I have spent over 1,600 hours working with my team here at Cynergy and the team at Quickcomm to deliver the most disruptive TEM solution on the market and I'm extraordinarily proud and privileged to have worked with both teams.

Since the completion of that project a short while back, I have since made the transition for being a Technical Lead to Business Development -- yes, the dreaded "sales" guy. I was ready for a new challenge beyond coding and the growth opportunities here at Cynergy made this transition both seamless and a no-brainer. So now I get to put on my sales hat: If you're interested in speaking with us about an idea you have or have an existing application you want re-invented to provide a better user experience, drop us a line and we're happy to speak with you further. And of course, if you have any feedback at all about the re-launched CynergyTV, feel free to leave a comment and I'll make sure it reaches the right people immediately.

Lastly, if you're a developer who wants to work with a phenomenally talented team that continually delivers cutting edge applications, we'd love to speak with you about career opportunities at Cynergy. It's a great time to be building RIAs and we'd love for you to be a part of it!

Of note, our Vice President, Dave Wolf, will be giving a presentation in Room 2016 entitled Sticky Eyeballs: How UX Wins Market Share. Dave has spoken at numerous conferences, including last year's keynote at AJAXWorld, and he's extremely engaging and passionate about this topic, so I highly recommend you check it out if you're attending the show.

Also, Cynergy continues to push the envelope to deliver stunning, engaging rich internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and we'd love to show you what we've been working on. We'll have a large booth (#721) in the expo hall where we will be showing off our latest applications and we'd love for you to stop by and say hello.

If you can't make the conference, don't forget that we still have demonstrations of some of our applications online via CynergyTV and we also have our Cynergy Labs R&D site up, which includes a demonstration of our wildly popular Project Maestro.

Hope to see you in San Franscisco!

OK, with the advertisement out of the way, let me expand a little bit on who we're looking for and why we're a great place to work.

What We're Looking For

First and foremost, if you're new to Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, that's totally OK. From talking with other developers at conferences and meetings, there seems to be a misconception that you need to be a seasoned Flex developer in order to be considered for a position at Cynergy (and, well, Silverlight is literally only months old). However, nothing could be further from the truth. While we have some of the most experienced Flex developers around, this is what we're looking for:

• Passion: I put this before any technical skill because it's the most important thing that we're looking for. We want people who are as excited as we are about the RIA market and who want to continually push the envelope by developing world-class experiences for our customers using Adobe Flex, Adobe Apollo, and/or Microsoft Silverlight. When I was first looking into joining Cynergy, I was a bit skeptical as to the definition of this "passion" that people always say they're looking for, as it's seemingly arbitrary. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that the energy my co-workers have on a daily basis is both jaw-dropping and contagious, and my personal fire to get into building RIAs fit in perfectly.
• Object Oriented skills: Not everything about working here is "abstract." The reality is that you simply can't build scalable, maintainable RIAs without a solid OO foundation. You don't have to be able to recite and define every single design pattern, but you need to be able to define and understand terms such classes, objects, inheritance, composition, etc. If you have a firm grasp there, then learning the language is just syntactic sugar and you'll take right off.
• Current experience: OK, so hopefully it goes without saying that if you have current experience with any versions of these technologies that it's serious bonus points. That being said, we've found that people with solid AJAX experience do well because the asynchronous nature of the Flash Player is a web development mind shift that can trip people up. However, don't worry about what specific technologies you have or haven't worked with in the past; the reality is that the RIA market is still young and you're just not going to get resumes with four, five, or six years of real RIA experience.
• Possibility of relocating near one of our offices: Let me stress right off the bat that this is not a core requirement to joining our team. Heck, I'm currently writing this from my apartment in New York City. If you have existing solid experience or are willing to travel to one of our offices for a while at the beginning to get up to speed (we pay for all expenses, of course), working remotely is certainly an option. That being said, we do find that being in one of our offices accelerates your growth at a much more rapid pace and try to get people as close as possible to one of them. Currently, we have offices in Washington, DC; San Diego, California; Grand Rapids; Michigan; Rochester, New York; and Copenhagen, Denmark. We are absolutely going to be expanding that list in the very near future, though I'm not at liberty to disclose that information just yet (sorry!).

If you're not put off by any of those items and are looking for a new challenge, then please, please, please, send us your resume. The great part about Cynergy is that everybody is accessible, including our president, Carson Hager. To that end, please e-mail him if you have any questions that you don't think are appropriate for me (i.e., I don't deal with anything related to compensation) and he will get back to you as close to immediately as possible. Of course, if there's anything I haven't addressed here that you want to know more about, please leave a comment or contact me offline, as I'm happy to answer any and all questions myself.

Why Cynergy?

So now that you have idea as to who we're looking for, why do you want to be working here? Well, frankly, I am constantly amazed at the type of applications we're building. A year ago, I never would have thought these sorts of applications could be developed using web technologies. Now, a lot of that credit has to go to Adobe for providing us with such a powerful, easy-to-use framework, however I've seen co-workers like Andrew Trice and Keun Lee do things with Flex that I never thought could be done with the current framework features. And have you seen our CynergyTV showcase? That's just a small tip of the iceberg relative to the other applications we have built (we value our customers' privacy and we're sometimes restricted from publicly demo-ing the solutions we build for them).

While those are amazing applications, what does that have to do with wanting to work here? Well, the same developers who built those applications are still here at Cynergy and delivering better applications all the time. The sense of genuinely being a part of a team is prevalent throughout the company and I've never run into a situation where somebody wasn't willing to help, regardless of their own workload. That teamwork starts from the top, and Carson, Dave Wolf, and Keith O'Donnell (our Management Team), treat us as their equals and we are very much involved in many aspects of the direction of the company (but hey, we're still developers, so we leave many other things to them!). They recognize that without us, Cynergy will not survive, and we're very well taken care of and are provided any and all resources necessary to succeed as a result. If you're curious about our retention rate, since I've started here last fall, literally nobody has left the company. That's just the type of fun, yet professional, culture that has been built and we are fiercely protective of that.

This is an amazing time to be working at the leading RIA services firm, and you can help be a part of that success. Send us your resume because we'd love to chat!

What's interesting to me about this debate is that, once again, with the introduction of a new, potentially disruptive technology, it always winds up being an "either/or" discussion rather than an "and" discussion. That is, the debate can usually be distilled down to why one would use technology X rather than technology Y when the discussion should really be how one can use both technology X and technology Y. As a real-world example, simply replace "technology X" with "Adobe Flex" and replace "technology Y" with "AJAX" in the previous example and do a simple internet search. I mean, I thought that we, as developers, were in the business of delivering the best product to our employer/customer/client rather than a product that uses a specific technology simply because that's their personal preference? Did I miss something?

Dave Wolf, Vice President of Consulting at my employer, Cynergy Systems, wrote an excellent blog entry this morning entitled Wake up and see the Silverlight, which discusses just how phenomenally important Microsoft's Silverlight announcement is to the Rich Internet Application (RIA) industry. As he notes:

...[T]his week's news that Microsoft has officially named Sparkle - WPF/E as Silverlight and that it is clearly and finally on its way to market truly is the tipping point that establishes that RIA's are real, RIA's are the future and RIA's will shape the way we are going to be developing software for some time to come. Microsoft just justified and legitimized RIA. That is HUGE.

Dave hits the nail on the head in his entry, and I won't try and re-hash it here, as I wouldn't be able to do it justice.

However, my point is that this isn't about how Silverlight is going to squash Flex, or vice versa. This is about how the RIA industry just became the focal point for future development, and that's an incredibly important validation of Adobe Flex and, by extension, Apollo. By recognizing that the equivalent of the Adobe Flash Player is the future of delivering engaging web applications, Microsoft validated the Player as that delivery platform. Hence, they built their own.

Did Microsoft declare that Adobe is officially in their cross-hairs? Absolutely. Is the first release of Silverlight going to knock the snot out of Adobe Flex? Absolutely not. But let's be honest here -- for anybody that used either Flex 1.0 or Flex 1.5, those initial releases left a lot to be desired themselves, so let's not be so quick to bash Silverlight as a failure waiting to happen. It'll likely have its warts, much the same as Flex 1.x did. But, in true Microsoft form, once they get that second or third release out and their development community on board, the RIA space is going to have at least two major players from which developers will be able to deliver rich, engaging applications. I don't know about you, but I couldn't be more excited!

Have a look at Dave's entry to get a more thorough analysis of the impact of the Silverlight announcement. Don't worry Adobe fans, Flex isn't going anywhere. In fact, I think it got just a whole lot stronger!

Today we launched Cynergy TV, an interactive Flex-based channel where we will be publishing all sorts of showcases, flex tips, tricks, etc., that we hope will benefit the Adobe Flex community. As an employee at Cynergy, I'm incredibly excited to see where we take this, and I definitely plan on contributing as we move forward with the initiative.

So what's this about "Adobe Flex at its best?" Well, "episode 1" showcases some of our most engaging applications. I've noticed several flexcoders and blog posts from people who don't think Adobe Flex is verstaile-enough to be taken seriously or is limiting in its design. I simply disagree, and I hope that these showcases will provide some inspiration for you to create some truly interactive solutions. Our showcases really exhibit Adobe Flex at its best. From ColdFusion to Java to .NET, we've created high-impact solutions that integrate with all sorts of back-end systems.

Are you a developer who has worked with Flex or AJAX on some level and is interested in joining the industry leader in Rich Internet Applications? Shoot us an e-mail with your resume. We really want to hear from you. As it says all over our corporate web site, "Let's Talk." ;)