Serge Jespers

Wow… Has it really been 2 years already? That means I joined Adobe 2 years and 8 months ago. Wow… Time does fly when you’re having fun! :D A year ago, I wrote a blog post looking back at my first year as an evangelist. I thought I should make this a tradition and thus here’s year two…

While I definitely travelled less this year (mostly thanks to economy and thanks to the fact that our European team has grown quite a bit) I still managed to talk to a guesstimated 14000 people (same as last year) on 34 trips (compared to 53 trips last year). On average, a trip was 2.85 days so I spent about 97 days away from home (163 days last year). I visited 25 different cities in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia, which gave me a carbon footprint of about 15000 kg.

Blog visits grew 200% compared to last year with visitors coming from 197 different countries. The top 5 countries are the US, Belgium, the UK, Germany and to my surprise India in 5th place. 33.4% of all the traffic on my blog came from referring sites (thanks for the links!). My Adobe On Twitter post was the most popular post this year getting 4.8% of all the traffic this year. May 11th was the best day for my blog when my blog post about the release of the new NY Times reader was featured on Techmeme.

My “Create Flex Components with Flash CS4 Professional” video is my most popular video tutorial on Vimeo. Looking at my Vimeo account just made me realize that I should really pick this up again. So my goal for the rest of the year is to put up some new tutorial videos. Keep an eye on my blog, Adobe TV or Vimeo account…

This has been another spectacular year with plenty of highlights… but if I had to pick one, I would say that my demo in the day 2 keynote at MAX in Los Angeles was probably my biggest highlight of the year. The audience, the venue and the team behind MAX made this a truly amazing experience. One I hope to repeat many times! I also had a lot of fun building the MAX widget. It was amazing to see the numbers the widget generated and therefore a big thank you to all of you who installed it on your blogs, Facebook pages etc. Aah man… Seriously… Just picking one or two highlights isn’t enough. There’s also my trip to India, the trip to Israel, … Yes… This really is a cool job! ;-)

Oh… Speaking of cool jobs… You may have heard that my good friend and colleague Andrew Shorten is moving into a new role at Adobe. That means we need a replacement for Andrew. Those are some mighty big shoes to fill but if you feel like you could be a perfect candidate for the job, check out Andrew’s post about the job and make sure you send us your resume today.

Year 3 has just started and I can already tell you it’s going to be a very interesting year! I’m really excited about getting Flash Player 10.1 on devices, the imminent release of AIR 2.0, Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst… It’s going to be another amazing year!

Exactly (well… almost exactly ;-)) a year ago, I joined the platform evangelism team at Adobe. I thought this would be an excellent time to look back at this year.

I talked to approximately 14000 people (this is just a guesstimate but it should be pretty close). That’s an average of 269 people every single week. In total, I did 53 trips this year. So, one trip a week. On average, one trip takes 3 days which means I spent 163 days or 23 weeks away from home. That’s about 62% of all working days. I visited about 30 different cities all over Europe, Middle East and Africa. That does give me 80000+ air miles (and platinum status on Brussels Airlines) but sadly also means that I am responsible for a carbon footprint of 21226 kg (according to my Dopplr account). The other day, I was looking for a way to offset my carbon footprint, but I found that all these organizations seem to be US based. If anyone knows of an organization in Europe, please let me know. My hosting provider is already using 100% green energy but I feel I should do more than that.

The visitors on my blog have grown 1000% compared to a year ago. A big thank you for that! The most popular article was my much talked about Silverlight article that I published in July. It was responsible for 6% of all my traffic this year. 37% of all traffic on my blog came from a referring site (Again, thank you!). People from 163 different countries read this blog with most of you coming from the US (25%) and the Benelux (19%) in second place.

This year has been truly amazing and this job turned out to be everything I thought it would be… and more! In all honesty, it can be pretty tiring sometimes, but meeting people that are working on cool apps and getting positive feedback at conferences is just so amazingly energizing!

Thank you for a truly spectacular year and I’m sure we’ll bump in to each other over the next 12 months!