Paul Bonneville

2009 has been quite the banner year for me for learning new “mad skills” to refresh my crusty programming repertoire.

Having been in and out of Web & interactive development over the past 13 years, I had let my skills stagnate up until late 2007 when I fully planted myself back into the interactive field after a little 3 year hiatus into real estate and an online venture. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to how that went since I’m here writing this now.

2008 found me getting back into the web world by playing digital-jack-of-all-trades as a web designer, developer, information architect and project manager for a small interactive marketing company out of Florida. I worked for them remotely from Columbus, OH but had no time to spend actually learning new technologies because I was too busy spinning plates and swapping hats. Working solo as a all-in-wonder-boy in cracked pajamas is not all it’s up to be.

In 2009, after a good friend landed me a job with a fairly sizable pharmaceutical marketing firm, first is was learning ActionScript 3 (AS3) and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) for developing Adobe Flash applications. In parallel to learning AS3, I learned a programming framework called PureMVC. Then it was getting my nose back into PHP and learning a whole new open source Content Management System (CMS) called MODx. Then there is the PHP Zend framework I’m working on currently, rounding out the year with a return to another AS3 framework called Flex. Put that all together and what’s that spell? AS3OOPPUREMVCPHPCMSMODXZENDFLEX. Er…absolutely nothing but it does look like some of the drug names I work on at my day job.

2010 potentially has iPhone development on the table so far, along with continuing my return to 3D modeling and animation (hence the conceptual bear sketch for a model I’m working on) and learning a relatively new game development platform called Unity. The current plan for next year also has more acronyms, like UML for example, rolled into it along with more brain numbing programming best practices. 3d and gaming is the bees knees and holds a lot of untapped potential in other markets.

When you have a fancy title like Digital Engineer, such is the learning burden you carry. You will also find that losing a job and having a hard time getting a new one due to outdated skills can be a very motivating factor. You can teach an old dog new tricks. Woof I say.

All in all, I’ve successfully completed one of my main goals for 2009: Reestablish a solid core of interactive skills to stabilize my career while I continue to cook up new entrepreneurial endeavors to get myself back into on the side.

I think I’ve got this self-taught thing down :)