RasterWeb!OpenLaszlo… Finally, a legitimate use for Tomcat…
I was just yesterday I talked about my Flash issues, and later that night at the October Milwaukee Web Design Meetup our pal Justin did a demo of OpenLaszlo.
I had heard of OpenLaszlo before, but didn’t quite get what it was. Luckily a quick demo and a few questions was all it took to see that it could be a useful tool.
By the way, the October Meetup was at C2, but the November Meetup will be at Z2. (How’s that for confusing?)
One of the coolest things that happened at BarCampMilwaukee was that, during the introductions, Dustin Dupree said he wasn’t leading any sessions, but if anyone wanted to know about Flash, they should ask him. Someone yelled out “Lead a session!” and sure enough, a session on Flash happened later, led by Dustin. I’m glad that Dustin felt like embracing the idea of “you are an expert at your own experience” and sharing what he knows about Flash. To me, this is the spirit of BarCamp, and I was glad to see it happen.
I was sorry I missed that session (Scott seemed to enjoy it) because people keep telling me that there are open-source tools for Flash, but every time I dig through osflash.org I just get confused and can’t seem to find any sort of Mac OS X development tools that look appealing to me.
Cory Zimmerman of Z2 Marketing + Design presented a session at BarCampMilwaukee titled “How to not think and succeed – Starting and running a firm.”
I thought the basic idea was somewhat similar to the 37Signals idea of "Getting Real", where you can’t let planning and over-thinking get in the way of actually doing something. I’ve been involved in businesses before where grand schemes were discussed over and over and never acted upon. It’s the whole “ideas are useless, execution matters” thing.
From what I’ve seen, Cory and his partner Deb have made Z2 successful by doing the right amount of planning, just enough to keep from flying by the seat of their pants, and then executing on their ideas. Yes, they’ve dealt with failure, but Cory didn’t think it was due to a lack of thinking or planning.
I’ve tried to adopt similar ideas for 2XL Networks, focusing more on doing and less on thinking, or over-thinking, as it were. Maybe a good deal of this is based on previous experience, but if that is the case, then people starting out might do well to focus on doing as well, to actually gain that experience…
