Today's post was originally going to be about Flex Camp Miami, but then fate sadly intervened and it is now about my layoff from my position at Universal Mind. It seems that the economic downturn has hit UM too and this has unfortunately cost myself and several other talented developers their jobs at UM. It's easy to feel angry at a time like this, but I don't blame them - its tough just to survive right now. Plus, I really enjoyed my time there even if it was far shorter than I would have hoped - it was challenging and fun while it lasted.

Anyway, enough of the sob story and on to the future. Obviously, if you are looking for a Flex, AIR and ColdFusion developer in the Boston area or to work remotely, please contact me. I am willing to consider contract or freelance work as well. Since this is a bit of a shock, I am only just getting to updating my resume which I hope to have soon, but in the meantime you can see more about me and view a list of my publications and presentations as well as some of my open source project contributions if you are interested.

Five new projects and seven updates in this very busy week. I have been so focused on the upcoming Flex Camp Miami that I had let a rewrite of my open source list languish a bit. It is now built with Flex and while it may not offer much more in the way of functionality, it finally fixes the issues in IE that were caused by the Ajax tab code in cftab. I also rewrote the admin so that maybe I will update it more often, though I have a lot of catching up to do.

I wanted to post about some important announcements regarding Flex Camp Miami including a registration referral incentive program and a great group rate discount at the nearest hotel to the event. Flex Camp Miami is fast approaching so if you haven't yet registered, I recommend you register today!

Flex Camp Miami is only two weeks away (only $30 for a full day including lunch - register today!) and since we have a really amazing lineup of speakers, I have been taking advantage by interviewing them about their sessions and other topics of interest. Today I am interviewing Andrew Powell of Universal Mind. Andy was a speaker at my previous Flex Camps and he is well known for speaking at a variety of conferences such as 360|Flex, MAX, CFUnited and cf.Objective() among others. Andy is a contributor to the Merapi project, which he will be speaking about, and the winner of the 360|Flex API Contest: Ribbit Category.

Flex Camp Miami is only 16 days away (so register today!). As part of my ongoing series of posts interviewing the speakers for the event, today I interview Laura Arguello of ASFusion. Laura and Nahuel are the creators of the Mate Flex framework. Laura is a well known blogger as well as an extremely accomplished developer including winning awards such as the Mary Murray Outstanding Computer Scientist Award at the University of California, Irvine, and the Adobe Flex Derby contest in 2006.