Amy Blankenship

Bio

Amy Blankenship was born breech on Friday the 13th in Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent most of her childhood. When she was 10, the family moved to Germany for three years, and her mother temporarily gave up teaching English and French to become a tour guide. She brought the family along on many of her adventures, and this exposed Amy to the great cities of Europe and inspired a lifelong love of travel.

Amy attended Mississippi State University and graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design and Photography, and her first jobs were design jobs in print and screen printing shops and the local newspaper. However, in 1996, she was hired to do the graphic design for a project to build Computer Based Training for the weather school at Keesler Air Force Base. She took up the challenge of performing some of the Authorware programming on the course, and has been increasing the number of languages she develops in and wearing many hats ever since.

This has included doing instructional design and development for eLearning projects for the Navy and Job Corps, creating an authoring system for interactive wiring diagrams for AM General, and doing websites, Flash, and Flex for a variety of clients. Currently, she develops and project manages for the parent company of VOIP.com, using a blend of ASP classic, css, DHTML, and Flash to interact with data from a SQL Server back end. She combines her love of travel with her desire to share information by speaking at conferences around the world, and she has spoken on various topics in the U.S., England, Scotland, Germany, and Denmark.

Amy lives about 15 miles north of Gulfport, MS on a small hobby farm. She has 5 dogs, 3 cats, 12 chickens, 3 goats, and a wonderful husband, Steve Howard. Steve is an Adobe Community Expert for eLearning and Mobile and Devices and is the User Group Manager for the Gulf Coast Adobe User Group.

She blogs about her farm at http://amysfarm.blogspot.com/ and her current favorite development platform, Flex, at http://flexdiary.blogspot.com/. She blogs on InsideRIA at http://insideria.com/amy-blankenship/.