[Editorial note: I wrote this the day after Doug gave his talk, but wanted to wait until the video was uploaded so you could see why I was so impressed. You can find a video of Doug's talk here: http://tinyurl.com/yb3pkdt Also note, this is the first show where I got to see all the talks and boy was that nice!]

Now, before I hurt the feelings of other speakers, let me give a little background before I get to explaining that title.

Doug and I live very different lives. He drops the f-bomb to make a point, while I use “silly” cuz “stupid” is too harsh a word to say around my boys. He drinks like a fish, while root beer is the strongest stuff I drink (with vanilla ice cream, preferably). We don’t sit and chat about life; In fact, we sorta rarely chat at all. However, neither do my real-life brother and I, but there’s an understanding and a bond.

With my real life brother, the bond is familial. We share a mom and dad. With Doug, it’s a common goal. We want to get people thinking and excited about learning. Of course, we do it in our own way. Doug does this by creating amazing projects that leverage other people’s work, which makes you think, “Dang, why didn’t I think to do that?” Then he throws down the gauntlet and challenges you to take what he’s done and make something even cooler. Doug leads by example and doesn’t hold back the truth when you’re not performing at your peak. This is evident by his rants about the Flex Framework. My favorite quote of his is “The Flex Team is good, but not god.” I, on the other hand, am more of a hand holder. I’ll, literally, spend weeks writing up a post or article that explains how to use the Flex Component Kit for Flash or how to graduate your code hackery to an architected system. I began Silvafug and 360|Flex (the latter with John) with one singular goal: to teach people the skillsets they need to better themselves and better serve the Flex community.

That said, while I am a McCune fanboy like everyone in the community, you can see there’s something deeper.

When we first started the concept of the RIAdventure 360 cruise, the concept I tried to explain to Josh and John was this: “We need to create a conference of forward thinking talks. We need to have the presenters not just talk about what tools exist and what’s been done, but also present ideas and concepts that force the attendees to think fresh and spurs them into action. Psychologists say that being in a new, unfamiliar surround spurs learning.  Therefore, what better place to learn than in a classroom that’s sailing atop the Caribbean Sea.” We knew the two at sea days were going to be the conference days. These luckily fell on the first and last full days, thus sandwiching the four at port days in the middle. My original idea had presenters kickstarting the concepts to get people thinking and throwing out “calls to action” to the attendees. The group would reorganize five days later on the second day of the conference to explain how they were going to make things happen when they got back home. John wanted more bang for the back on the other days and Josh mentioned the loose dinner discussions that took play on the first RIAdventure. That great idea of theirs would hopefully provide a way to carry on the discussion.

When I lined Doug up to be a speaker it was over IM.  At first, he declined, then I explained the concept of the conference. He quickly got it and agreed to do the show.

To say that Doug’s talk was inspirational would be an understatement. Over the past few months, Doug has told me that he was bringing his “A game” to the show. While many thought this conference was an excuse to take a cruise, Doug realized it was just as serious as any other presentation he’d give on land.

Doug presented us with a history of Data Visualization. Humbling us by proving things we’re doing now in Flex are not new, but have existed for hundred and sometimes thousands of years. He then moved on to the idea that Data Viz came about because of the need to process huge amounts of data. He explained how cities and governments are putting all their data live and accessible. With more and more data, we’ll need new ways to present that data in meaningful ways. This provides us an opportunity to create something new. Much like someone at some point in time created the bar chart, we too can create something new to help the world process this massive amount of data. Doug is embarking on his own self-created Data Vizualization Degree. If you want to be a member of the graduating class with him, here are the areas of study:

Historical Data Visualization
Contemporary Infographics
Basic Statistics
Computer Algorithms
Statistical Programming
Distributed Programming
Color Theory
Cartography
Artistic Composition

An interesting sidepoint to Doug’s presentation was the “Your data/Your Life” concept. This basically means that it’s now possible to capture every detail of your life in data. In Doug’s case, it was his location every 5 minutes (tracked via his cell phone). This created a heat map that highlighted most of his life was spent at his house and his girlfriend’s home. He turned that into an engraving that he gave his girlfriend. Soon after, they were engaged and living together at her place. He used that example to show that while we can collect all that data, no one will really care about it except ourselves and maybe those close to us. For me, that was sorta the driving force behind Poemsformywife.com. While technically, it is a website of poetry for my wife that she or anyone can view, it’s become apparent that it’s a site only I care about. By that, I mean I read the old poems more often than my wife because I like to relive the moments that I spent writing them. While to her and others, they’re not great poetry and thus would never warrant a reread.

Doug McCune, for all his zaniness, is a true intellectual at heart. He gets it. He gets how to inspire. He gets how to teach. He gets that we live only one life and it’s not to live it in solitude, but instead to try our hardest to help and teach our fellow man. For that we love him…well, that and his two thumbed faced logo. :)

[Update: Doug's publicly declared his switch from Flex Programmer to full fledged Data Visualization Engineer. Read up on it here. ]