David Stiller

David Stiller loves learning things, partly because it feels good to make progress (even when progress is slow) and partly because learning never ends. Things get even better when he’s able to share this love, whether as a mentor or recipient, with others equally inclined to learn. David graduated with an English degree in Creative Writing in the late ’90s, and then forged a completely new career in multimedia development within a couple years of being in the workforce. He taught himself many tools in the Adobe creative suite—this was before the days of blogging, YouTube tutorials, and AI-assistance—and eventually acquired enough mastery to become, for many years, an official Adobe Community Expert. During this period, Adobe even invited him to join the Flash beta team. He co-authored and/or contributed to several books on Flash for Apress, Focal Press, and O’Reilly; wrote around 100 tutorials, including articles for the Adobe Developer Center; led a few online video training courses; spoke at conferences; sat on the Board of Advisors for Sessions College for Professional Design; and ran his own multimedia business full time for twelve years.

The tech community evolves, of course. After a really good run, Flash Player was ultimately dropped by modern browsers and became a relic of the past. (Cue the realization that learning never ends!) David shifted to JavaScript, Python, HTML5 and other related and unrelated languages, while also providing animation, voiceover, writing, graphic design, and video production for countless promotional ventures. Nowadays, he builds multimedia frameworks by day and, in the evenings, deconstructs artifacts like payphones, stoplights, and even audio cassettes, to rebuild them into interactive props that rise to new life on microprocessors.

David also loves to quietly walk in the woods in his own back yard, because that’s learning too—often of a much deeper kind. He listens to birds, listens to music from all over the world, reads literature prodigiously, plays unplugged boardgames, and constantly contemplates his place in the world and what that could mean. Ideally, it’s something that brings joy to people.