What will they make fun of me for not knowing?

January 14, 2009 9:53 PM

Help me prep for an interview for a Flex job.

I have an interview for a job doing Flex development in a couple of days.

I'm not an established Flex developer. I've spent most of my career writing C++ code for Windows applications, with a couple of Flash proof-of-concept type projects here and there and some Flash toys I wrote at home. I got my foot in the door (I think) by writing an Adobe AIR application in the last month or so in Flex that interacts with social networks (and publicizing that to them) and by doing a Flex programming test for them.

I feel pretty comfortable with Actionscript and haven't had much of a problem getting things done with it, but I still have no idea what the average Flex developer knows. What are the things they might expect me to know?

posted by ignignokt to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Best answer: Things that have nothing to do with Flex. As Silvanus P. Thompson observed, "What one fool can do, another can"; and any fool can grab a reference and find the Flex int class handles 32-bit integers and provides a static int.MIN_VALUE. Knowing that off the top of your head is great, but hardly essential.

What's more important is your experience as a coder. If you get a Flex question and you don't know the answer, move the conservation by observing how you addressed that general problem -- whatever it is -- in C++.

C++ is pretty complicated (and wonderfully expressive); if you can demonstrate you have a handle on its more abstruse concepts, you'll be telling your interviewer that you know how to learn any language. Then ou just need to convince him that in addition to coding, yiu know how to think about algorithms and data structures and patterns.
posted by orthogonality at 12:49 AM on January 15, 2009

Best answer: There's no such thing as an 'average' Flex developer. Sure, you can read the blogs and if you can understand what they're talking about, you'll be good to go. But every company I've ever worked with has had its own way of dealing with AS3 (or any programming language in general). You'll have to get into their system of coding anyway.
posted by jedrek at 5:48 AM on January 15, 2009

It might be worth reading up on the Cairngorm framework. It's the Adobe endorsed framework for enterprise Flex applications. It's nothing but MVC and while I would never consider it a requirement for someone I hire, familiarity would be a plus because we use it extensively.
posted by minimal at 7:16 AM on January 15, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks for your advice, guys. I ended up preparing by reading up a bit on Cairngorm and describing, out-loud, the Flex project I was working on, as well as previous projects I've done in C++.

They ended up asking questions about the tests that they had me do, and Flex-wise, they didn't go beyond that. The rest of the interview was largely talking about previous work that I had done, but not in great detail. I ended up getting an offer (although I wasn't able to take it), so I guess it went well enough.
posted by ignignokt at 2:43 AM on January 30, 2009