Scrum is a development process most recognizable by its 30 day sprints. Brightcove uses Scrum for all of its development. I recently went to a course from Ken Schwaber for the exalted title of Certified Scrum Master (which comes with its own secret handshake). From my notes on this course, I've written some thoughts on Scrum, which are below. The notes below aren't meant to encompass all aspects of Scrum.

While trying to finish my speech for 360Flex at Au Bon Pain, I witnessed one of the oddest things I've seen in awhile. The whole second floor of the restaurant (the Au Bon Pain near MGH, for the Bostonians reading) was full of people trying to schedule interviews or interviewing potential "employees", people who mentioned they had no money and were looking for a second income.

Unlike a year ago, there's a lot of conferences these days where you can learn about Flex. So why head to 360Flex Seattle? Besides it being a Flex-only conference and having great speakers, the last incarnation of the conference should send you to this one. Was 360Flex San Jose the first Flex-only conference? I think so, and even if it wasn't, it felt like it.

Ryan Stewart, who keeps growing on his uncanny ability to find stories, posted a link to the Aftermix invite form in a blog post last week. We won't be allowing everyone into Aftermix for the short term as we still work like mad on the beta version. But I hope everyone still fills out the form to check this out, and I'll also be posting a way to make sure your request is selected. (And sorry but it won't be a Flex quiz.) There's also the invites at 360Flex.

Recently someone taught me a neat trick with Charles. I had a SWF that was loaded in a much larger SWF and HTML page, but I didn't want to build these other pieces. I had access, however, to a testing site where the SWF/HTML pages were located, and with this I could use "Map Local". Map Local allows you to map URLs to local directories. This means that you can test a SWF that should be on a remote site.

As you've probably already heard (even a half hour later, from the blog posts I just saw), Flex 3 is available for download and the bug base is now open to all. I wish I had a little time to play with it, but it's a weekend and week of heavy Aftermix coding. I had to spend a few minutes, however, to run this amusing JIRA report: My Flex Bugs Since it's been seven months since I worked there, that's a good indication of how open they are being with the bug base.

Too much work and too little blogging. Here's a catch-all post to catch up on Flex things. I've seen Buzzword, and... wow. Congrats to the Flex team there. I'm most impressed by the details, the way that little things just work. The news is old, but I'll still point out that FlexBox has been updated. It's an excellent way to find new Flex components. And related to FlexBox, since the IFrame component is on there, is that I've finally responded to the last month of comments on Embedding HTML.

Details on Aftermix have been slowly emerging, and Anthropomedia points to two of them in a post on Brightcove's Aftermix. For the MediaPost video mentioned, go to the 35 minute point to see Jeremy Allaire's demo of Aftermix. Or you can check out the early support video. I can't comment on the blog post's questions on the underlying business model, but I can briefly comment on the blog post's suggestion that Aftermix is half-baked right now.

Do you want to test or develop a video player that's viewed millions of times a month? How about working on a brand-new video editor? Brightcove is looking for more Flex and Flash people to work on brightcove.com. We're looking for both QA and developers to work on Aftermix, the site's video player, and more. Check out my previous post, Top 10 Reasons to Work at With Flex Brightcove, for some Aftermix-focused reasons to check things out.

Perhaps I'll be making changes to the Flex compiler once again. The Flex SDK is going open source. This is a great day for Flex! A few random thoughts: 1. I think the biggest change for a long time will not be open submissions but open bug reports. In time, the community contributors will matter more, but having everyone adding and sorting bugs will be a big deal. Flex has had a great beta program, but it doesn't compare to having everyone on the bug base. 2.