Gone — Does Flash Live On?

timbot
timbot
Jul 24, 2017 · 5 min read

There was a magical time in the history of the web. And in one very important way that time lives on still.

It was the age of plugins — when companies sidestepped all the pain of cross-browser problems, ditched the vagaries of CSS and the stagnant nature of javascript, and relegated the role of the browser to a delivery system for their own technology.

Unconstrained by standards, they pushed the technology far and fast. And among plugins, none could challenge the supremacy of the Flash player.

Adobe built an entire sophisticated development environment around their proprietary format, from build tools to wrappers like AIR for desktop applications.

The Hidden Impact of Flash

In addition to it’s capabilities, Flash provided a pathway for introducing junior talent into the professional world. Many developers, myself included, came into the workplace to do simple low-value things like banner ads made in Flash. But while doing this we brushed shoulders with more sophisticated developers, in time learning on-the-job about Object Oriented development. In 2006 with Actionscript 3 we already had many of the language features that are only finding their way into javascript now.

But there would be no Actionscript 4. In 2009 the door on the plugin ecosystem abruptly slammed shut when Apple banned them from their devices.

It would be easy to think that the effects of Flash are long gone by now. My own company completed its last Flash project in 2011. I shed a small tear and moved on.

In One Way That Time Lives On

But there is at least one way those interesting days continue to significantly affect modern development — the education system.

Many post-secondary schools were very slow to adapt to the disappearance of Flash, continuing to feature it in curriculum years after it became irrelevant. Today it would be unusual to see it taught, but in many respects the effect of the abrupt disappearance of the web technology is still being felt.

At the height of Flash’s popularity you could get started at a workplace with rudimentary skills. That workplace would be one of the “interactive agencies” popping up getting all the headlines for snatching budget from the stodgy old traditional agencies. They were shiny, sexy places to be. Going there was attractive, and frankly I feel fortunate to have seen and lived it.

The technology itself supported a wide variety of media — video, 3D assets, sound files of various kinds. It was far beyond HTML, and called for creative ability in a variety of fields.

So having some very basic code ability, combined with other media skills, meant you could go to work for an agency, and you would have a path in front of you.

Today the outlook has changed dramatically, and the agency world is not what it once was. Simply put, interactive agencies have run smack into the realization that they own no intellectual properties. Everything they make belongs to a client, and is temporary.

The death of Flash hit the interactive agency hard, snatching away a reliable means to pitch unique ideas. The desktop, their main means for delivering these experiences, increasingly became broken up into various camps of mobile devices. And clients learned to avoid being locked into proprietary solutions with their agencies.

Gone, But The Effect Lives On

The problem is that many of the education programs that started during the days of Flash, while removing the technology, have continued to format their programs as though students will head out into an agency. Increasingly they will not.

Such programs have remained extremely general, not recognizing that the barrier to entry has been raised significantly on the development side of things. It is a different world, and some of the things a developer would have picked up on the job one to two years into working are now up-front requirements to get started.

The Flash era suited both post-secondary education and interactive agencies. Schools always had general interactive arts programs. Those tended to be the programs teaching Flash. And while Flash was popular placements from those programs went up. Agencies, even interactive ones, worked on a television-like model of producing big hits that would then go away, yielding to the next interactive idea. Flash enabled that like nothing else. At the same time, schools provided a flow of junior talent, another necessity for agencies.

That time is never going to come again.

Today the place to be is software development. The web has crept along (speeding up lately!) to the point of becoming a viable development platform.

Using web technologies, startup companies have proliferated among renewed interest in the web on the part of investors. These companies are intent on building value through IP, rather than client relationships.

Running on LEAN methodologies, platform and software developers have challenged traditional development cycles. They are unafraid to launch while things are still in progress. Speed is important, as is a full understanding of the tools that enable their agile development process.

But in this speed, the process of acquiring and mentoring junior talent has in many companies been lost.

For experienced developers, wages continue to rise, but at the cost of companies getting blocked at the entry-level for developers due to lack of supply.

And so we are left with a situation where demand has increased for web dev skill sets, but education has failed to introduce curriculum to meet the need. At the same time internal training initiatives at web tech companies offer little in the way of structured mentoring, because there are fewer truly junior roles.

Can This Be Fixed?

It can, but only through a complete revision of the way things are currently done in education, starting with tearing down walls.

The Walled Garden

We used to work in proprietary software, that produced code in proprietary formats, that ran in proprietary runtimes. We built in secret, under non-disclosure agreements, using waterfall methods. Hiding things away was a competitive advantage.

It isn’t any more.

Today tech leaders race to be the first to open-source their work. By doing so, they take ownership of the mindshare of developers, attracting the best and brightest. They force themselves to innovate, knowing they can not rest on their accomplishments.

But schools remain the closed environments they have always been.

If education today is to remain relevant it needs to be open-sourced and available for public attention. If anything program coordinators should thrive by acquiring more viewers for their classrooms the same way developers seek pull-requests on their code repositories. Otherwise, keeping programs relevant among the lightning-speed changes of web development becomes an impossible task, distributed to only a few people.

All of this can happen, but would take huge effort to shed policies formed prior to the change of the industry to an open environment.

We may need something new. Personally, I’d like to work on that — one of the bigger, and more important problems available today.

If this sounds familiar, check out what we’re doing at Leafletlearning.com.

timbot

Written by

timbot

Digital Media Artist, developer, tech-enthusiast and entrepreneur. Founder of Oddly Studios Inc. in Toronto Canada.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade