New Flex Blog to add to your Favorite Feed Reader

Workday UI Blog at http://workdayui.wordpress.com(feed)

As many of you know, I joined Workday, Inc. back in June. Many people have asked, “Where do you go after eBay?” Well, for this developer, it was a company that’s doing some crazy, exciting things with Flex. Workday is an ERP SaaS company. For our frontend, we use Flex.

The exciting thing is that Workday’s choice of Flex wasn’t on a whim. They specifically chose Flex because of the amazing things that Flex can do that traditional web apps cannot. Here’s our app in a nutshell. It’s a custom built Flex VM built atop of Cairngorm. A UI server sends us a view and a model, which we then render together on the fly. We, the developer, create low-level components that the application makers then use as building blocks for our products. Therefore, the things we do vary greatly from creating a custom component one day, to creating an effect on another or tracking a logic issue in Cairngorm. And I literally do mean day to day as those were my last 3 days. One thing you will never be at Workday is bored.

At eBay, my users were a group of 20. Here, it’s literally the entire company (138 people and still looking for more). I say that on two levels. First, it’s our HCM system. We use our product just like our customers to track employee data. Secondly, our products (HCM, Financials, Payroll, etc.) are built on inhouse tools. Those tools are the exact same system as the final product. There’s nothing more rewarding than walking around the office and seeing YOUR work on EVERY employee’s screen. It’s just awesome to know you empower not only end customers, but also your coworkers.

One thing Workday is looking to do is give back some of our knowledge and experiences back to the community. The way we will do that is by sharing items on the Workday UI Blog at http://workdayui.wordpress.com(feed). There you will find posts on hard hitting technical Flex issues such as Memory Leaks in Classes to lighter UI topics like Fun with Icons. The things we’re doing here are pretty amazing and I hope you follow along not only to learn from us, but to share your knowledge with us as well.