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May 11, 2007
Flex metrics?
Flex metrics? Yesterday Tim O'Reilly noted "Our recent book Programming Flex 2 was our strongest new product release on Amazon in years." Ryan Stewart picked up on it too, and it was on Techmeme for awhile. But as Tim noted, strong first week sales of an eagerly-awaited book may not indicate longterm trends, so last night I was hunting for additional metrics. The Flex Jobs mailing list, started by Ted Patrick a few months ago, offers metrics, but I think these reflect awareness of the mailing list more than actual job demand. Technorati and Blogpulse can chart blog mentions of "adobe flex job", but I think the results end up with a lot of noise and aren't directly correlated with actual employment offers. Mike Potter pointed out the Indeed.com job board, which has charting, but I hadn't heard of Indeed.com before and am not sure how representative it is. Do you know of other measurements which might buttress Tim's bookbuying observation? Thanks in advance for any leads!
Posted by JohnDowdell at May 11, 2007 08:48 AM
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The fluctuation in FlexJobs is due to my occational posting of jobs from Indeed.com "Adobe Flex" there.
Cheers,
Ted :)
Posted by: Ted Patrick at May 11, 2007 09:42 AM
The evidence is my inbox. Daily I get emails from recruiters looking for Flex talent. Rarely I'll get a company / individual which makes sense considering bigger companies have more capital to take risks in newer technology.
It's been growing ever since 3 months before the release of Flex 2. The frequency has been decent enough to show it's a continuing trend.
The books themselves to me indicate the difference between Flash & Flex. The "We couldn't find anyone so we just had our Java developers learn Flash" argument seems to be more replaced by "Our Java developers learned Flex for this project, we just need someone who has more multimedia experience to help them out". The barrier of entry is gone, but the need for designers, production artists, and interaction designers on these teams remains just as strong.
$10 says O'reilly has similiar results next quarter.
Posted by: JesterXL at May 12, 2007 12:40 PM
From the title of this post, I thought you were going to shed some light on implementing analytics with Flex. CPG companies love metrics, yet Flex has no built-in analytics hooks. Best-of-breed Omniture has a Flash component, and this might work with Flex projects through some ActionScript trickery, but certainly not a great solution.
[jd sez: Sorry, no, this was metrics of Flex, rather than in Flex. I haven't heard of people directly connecting via Flex API and bypassing the HTML interfaces yet, but I'll keep my eyes open for it now.]
Posted by: Brett Walker at May 12, 2007 02:28 PM
Hi John,
Every few months, I post a graph of monthly posts to the flexcoders mailing list over on my blog (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/amcleod).
Its not empircal data, but is another indicator. The last graph is here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/amcleod/archives/2007/02/flexcoders_post_1.cfm
Alistair
Posted by: Alistair McLeod at May 13, 2007 09:05 AM