[taneem]

During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.

Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.

However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.

Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.

Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.

So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.

In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.

[krtkush]

Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers.

That era of discovery and expression was something special.

[tombert]

I had a similar experience. I learned ActionScript pretty early on (around age age 16 or so) because it was easier to get something visual built than any other thing I had used, while still feeling like "real" programming.

AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to get something built when I was just bored and wanted to make a new toy.

For me, nothing has really come along to replace Flash in regards to the "tangible" feelings you get. JS and WebGL and Canvas and whatnot are great, and definitely lead to better results in regards to the user experience, but I feel that they're a lot harder to "pick up and play".

[krtkush]

Agreed! The visual feedback was spot on in flash.

Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal folder for later dissection.

[Akinato]

Same here. Neil Cicierega and Weebl's crazy antics are what got me interested in basic programing way back when I was 12-13. From there I started doing more and more complicated things in Actionscript. Sure I didn't learn any theory and produced awful code -- but I got a conceptual idea of programming that has helped me feel comfortable tackling new languages today.

Making a dance video to Monty Python's "Camelot" song is what made me learn about sprite sheets and motion techniques. It encouraged me to start googling different camera angles to figure out how to frame my shots.

That's why I love seeing kids playing with Minecraft, as it contains many of the same elements that I was playing with when I was a kid. Now if we could only get them into Dwarf Fortress, THEN we'd be talking. :) Speaking of which, that steam launch is supposed to be soon.

[kevinwang]

Flash is also what got me into programming. I started by making incredibly shitty knockoffs of stick figure videos on YouTube in flash mx 2004, then realized it also had the power to make games, and it went from there

[on_and_off]

It was so special.

It was just the right mix of relative simplicity and power.

No wonder that all the creatives flocked to flash.

[daleharvey]

Curious and feel free to ignore, what was your screenname on the yahoo web design chat rooms? I also hung around there a lot around that time using one of those embarrassing screennames made by teens and their favourite songs (renegade_master)

I was one of the people constantly wishing flash would die. Although I am happy the open web won that battle, I was always hoping and am sad that nothing based on open standards came to replace it.

[pixelbath]

Lol, hey renegade_master_uk! I was ashido (and various permutations of that name) in those rooms. I jumped ship from server-side to go work on Flash applications in the early 2000s, then back to JS near Flash 9/10 (when the writing was on the wall), then back again to server-side.

[soylentcola]

You could've used the screen name "dale_4_damager" instead ;)

[Aardwolf]

There is still a huge amount of amazing content in flash, tons of games and movies on sites like newgrounds.

The older ones are fully self contained games, some of which are amazing, in a single swf file that works in all major operating systems (The newer ones started side loading data from servers though.)

I hope there will always remain ways to play those.

[cryptozeus]

Great story, all that isolation from Silicon Valley probably helped you focus on your craft and didn’t provide distractions.

[dpau]

thanks for sharing this wonderful story. it would make for a lovely short film.

[buboard]

In flash. but you have to hurry

[countryqt30]

That's exactly the spirit! The internet makes it so easy for "poorer" countries to level up damn quickly! Spread the word there! <3

[cmarschner]

So what are you doing these days?

[taneem]

I moved to Mars! My family immigrated to North America soon after and I studied and worked in tech ever since.

[deepaksurti]

From his HN profile: `Currently building retail tech at dheo.com`

[mikorym]

Was there a "computing hotspot" where you were at the time? I think with all the school issues (and university issues) in South Africa it would be cool to have sort of (physical) computing libraries with Raspberry Pis or something like that–a sort of enabling environment where independent kids would at least have the resources necessary to build an eventual career for themselves (perhaps unwittingly at first).

[antonvs]

Just a nit, (the Kingdom of) Lesotho is a separate country from South Africa, although it's landlocked by South Africa.

[mikorym]

I am South African so yes, I don't have any imperial ambitions in that regard. But having said that, Lesotho is rather dependant on South Africa (as OP hints). My question was really whether he was an outlier or whether his friends or immediate environment had a lot of (aspiring) coders.

In Southern Africa in general there was probably < 5% internet penetration back then.

[lawlessone]

you should write a book!

[Breza]

I'd read it!

[srachamim]

I spent 3 nights at Lushoto last week. Nice place!

[husamia]

Where are all the creatives flocking to nowdays? HTML5?

[dkswain]

Tiled. We’ve built a truly no-code/no-new-design-tool interactive experience builder. Https://Tiled.co

What people don’t often realize with flash was that the output was a file. Tiled is taking a similar approach in that we are “documentizing” interactive experiences. We call the output a microapp (think .swf) and these can be experienced as an embedded experience (both native and browser-based), offline/online, through their app or other platforms.