Back in January I published an article at Flex Developer ‘s Journal about how Flash programmers who really liked programming in Flash where forced by Adobe to learn Flex. Of course, how this ugly heavy-weight monster duo MXML/ActionScript3 can compare with elegant and attractive timeline/ActionScript2 coding?

But Flash developers have families and need to bread on their tables. They had to learn some Flex to be more marketable.

A couple of days ago, I had a conversation with my older son Yuri who is a young animator. He loves drawing and has a degree in classic animation. Over the dinner, I asked him how are his classmate doing? He replied that only a small group of people from his class are animators. Then he said the following phrase about himself and a group of his classmates who managed to survive in this extremely competitive field, “We sucked it up and learned Flash “.

This made me smile… Of course, how this boring process of adding ActionScript to a timelines can compare with really enjoyable inventing and animating cartoon characters? But Yuri has to pay his bills and has to work not only on the episodes for TV shows, but also on boring Web sites for a companies who sell expensive mattresses or nail polish…

We all sucked it up and learned Life.