Portnoy | Persist

After work, I met up with Jeff (persist) and we had a few beers at O’Callaghan’s. We’ve been talking about meeting up for a few weeks, and finally cleared our schedules and were able to hang out. We talked a lot about work, about Flash, about family. We also had some neat discussions about learning, and documentaries (NOVA was mentioned in particular). All in all, I had a blast.

I have to admit – I was a bit intimidated when I first met him, and still am to some degree. He knows a great deal about Flash, and makes some killer, crazy shit just because he can. We talked about the forums we frequent (were-here, twelvestone, WOT) and how we went about answering questions. For a long while, I used to troll around the General Flash Questions on WH. At my old job, I used to spend the first 30 minutes of my work day digging through posts and answering as many questions as I knew the answer to. This helped me a great deal, in all honesty. Because I had to explain how something in Flash worked to another, it helped solidify my understanding of the application. Good training.

But tonight, persist threw an interesting twist on things. He told me that he looked for questions that he didn’t know the answer to, and went about trying to figure things out from there. What a great approach! I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. Answering questions helps solidify what you know, but working out answers helps you grow. This is something I need to try, and I need to get back to tackling problems as a way to begin the day.

Here’s another cool thing: we talked about the role and importance of names with respect to our families. He mentioned his son’s name, and talked about how that particular name fit into the context of his family (how it was passed down, and where it first began). I talked a bit about my Chinese name, and how the overall structure is broken down. If you go back to my birthday discussion with my parents, you’ll see how my Chinese name is constructed through a variety of different influences.

Wel, persist pointed out that the Chinese name structure is remarkably close to XML (parent nodes, child nodes, heirarchy). LOL! We totally geeked out on that, and I was pretty tickled with his insight/assessment.

Good times. We had two beers, and called it a night. Actually, persist went back to IBM and had a few hours of work yet to complete. He was working on making 3-D graphs in Flash, and headed back to finish that up.

persist rocks. I’d love for him to meet Justin and Ben some time. I think they’d all get along smashingly.

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