I started my career as a Programmer and did a lot of programmatic designs. Unfortunately, I’m not artistic. So, my tools of choice for Design were Code and Mathematics.

Early on, I saw my colleagues working in Flash but didn’t notice anything that interested me. I don’t quite remember the exact chain of events, but I think it all started when I saw a friend writing code called “ASfunction” inside Flash, “What? You can write code to make the drawings do stuff?”

So, that was the magic; I can code and see things happen in real-time (no compilation, no render). And that was the only thing I did for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth. I spend most of my time writing ActionScript in TextPad and compiling it with a CLI called MTASC (from the same developer behind HAXE.org).[1] If memory serves me well, I used to maintain the ActionScript syntax for TextPad.[2]

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/haxe-programming-language/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/textpad-syntax-file-for-asmx/

Yeah, I actually got into Flash because I wanted to be an animator some day. I made some crappy cartoons but sadly my art skills never really improved, even with a fair amount of practice.

But in the process I learned about ActionScript and found I had a lot of fun coding things and playing with different programming constructs.

I keep meaning to try out haxe, it looks neat enough, but to me it's still kind of missing half of what I liked about Flash, which was the animation tooling.