Search Flex Components Free

Custom Search

December 17, 2007

My Max Experience in a Nutshell

Overall it was a worthwhile trip. I had a chance to put faces to a lot of the names I've come across in my Flex related web travels, forums and blogs. I was lucky enough to talk Cairngorm with Stephen Brewster, Flex Data Services with Jeff Vroom, ArrayCollections with Matt Chotin, Flex Builder with Mike Morearty, Flex Compiler with Roger Gonsalez. And many more. I was invited by the Adobe flex team to share my experiences and opinions with Flex 2.0

I got wowed by Alex Uhlman's cinematic effects seminar... truly cool stuff. I got a glimpse into the up and coming ModuleManager, now in 2.01 beta, while attending Roger Gonzales' seminar. I met several bigtime Flexcoder forum posters, and chatted on several occasions with Dimitri, getting his take on some of my application architectures. I got to meet the entire Flex team while scarfing down free cookies and I got to talk Framework with the Adobe Consulting guys out of Scotland (Iteration Two folks).

The venue itself was OK. The Venetian is just too big. There were folks staying at the Imperial Palace that could make it from their room to the conference faster than I could from my room at the Venetian. Plus they use this sickly sweet smelling air freshener that starts to permeate through all your clothing and doesn't get any better. The food at the conference was OK as well, however the stupid xylophone they started banging away on at 7:35am to let people know breakfast was ending at 8:00 is something I could have done without. Plus closing it down at 8am was particularly cruel, considering the open bar function at the Palms on Wednesday night. I think that the Palms venue was enjoyed by many but I'm getting old, so the music inside was too loud to talk and the temperature outside dropped quickly.

The content of the sessions and the people that we came to hear speak are what made this conference worthwhile. The vastness of the conference center, the long escalators, the bizarre schedules, the extremely brief exposure to food and drinks during the day, the questionnable venues were all a huge overkill. My advice for next year? Drop the blue man group 15 minute show and take that money to subsidize the ticket price of bringing my wife to the Palms.

Related Flex Tutorials