Flex, General, India, RIA, Usability, initRIA

Every Java developer I know has read her books and visited the Java Community Site she started. My first encounter with Kathy Sierra’s writing was when I started reading Head First Java a few years back, the book completely mesmerized me, It was unlike any other technical book I had ever read. I was not reading this book because I needed to know something but instead I was reading it because it was a lot of fun .. this is very unlike me and its very unlike technical books.

Later, I was introduced to her blog Creating Passionate Users and I was totally hooked … well technically the blog wasn’t just her’s but I was passionate about it mostly because of Kathy’s posts … her captivating style of writing and extensive knowledge on the subject was an excellent combination and the cleverly chosen supporting images were the icing. I was so passionate about her blog that every time I noticed a new post on it, I got goose bumps (Seriously !!).

About 10 months back, in early April of 2007, due to a very sad and alarming incident Kathy decided to discontinue writing her blog … I felt her pain and was very sad, I hope she has recovered from that incident and is enjoying life. I miss her blog a lot and even today I spend a good amount of time in its archives, there’s tons of knowledge in there and anyone who is in the business of creating stuff, software or otherwise, should read her articles.

Creating Passionate Users has inspired me in many ways … looking back at 2007, I realized that 2 of her posts played a very important role in my life last year. Most part of last year I was extensively involved in the Adobe Flex community in India .. the motivation of course was that I love Flex and I want the whole world to use it … the source of inspiration were two blog posts by Kathy Sierra …

Just like all Creating Passionate Users’ posts these posts also had some powerful pictures, in the below pictures Kathy explains the importance of “Being Friendly” on community sites … this is one of the key principles that Flex-India has followed over time ..

This is just one example of how much I have been inspired and influenced by Creating Passionate Users … It’s very sad that because of a few disoriented people so many young aspiring individuals like me will loose out on loads of knowledge we could have gained from Kathy’s writings. I am going to leave you all with some of my favorite posts and images from CPU … but before I do that, I would like to thank Kathy for sharing her wisdom with us and I hope that someday she would write again.

Here are a few posts from Creating passionate Users that I love …