Dead Ink Vinyl

I just returned from the 360Flex Seattle conference. Overall, it was an excellent conference with great sessions covering a variety of material for Adobe Flex. The Flex community is still rather small, so this conference had me shoulder to shoulder with the preeminent names in the field (Jeff Houser of The Flex Show leaps to mind). Due to the small conference size, a lot of value came from the informal Q&A’s with the presenters after each session and chit-chatting with other developers about their experiences, difficulties, and insights.

Flex developers come from a wide range of backgrounds. There were some management types and UI designers sprinkled in the mix, and I found that these people had the best questions and comments during the less technical sessions (e.g., “Design Eye for the Dev Guy”). About half of the attendees were designers—most with a strong background in Flash, but some Web (HTML/CSS) designers as well. The other half of attendees were developers—lots of .NET developers, a healthy batch of Java developers, enough Ruby developers so that I didn’t feel lonely, a handful of ColdFusion holdouts.

There were some areas where the conference could have been improved, though—most were related to communication.

• If I had known up front that the sessions would be video recorded and made available later, I would have been more inclined to join the Flex 101 and AIR 101 hands-on sessions, since I could watch the recordings of sessions I missed later.
• It wasn’t clear to me that the Flex Charity Code Jam (more, more) was intended to be a learning experience. I felt that as a Flex newbie, I wouldn’t have much to contribute.
• The vendors, who made it possible for me to attend an amazing conference for only $360, were tucked in a room off in the corner. I would have switched the chill-out room and the vendor room to give the vendors more presence. I swung through the vendor booths twice to pick up their marketing material note all of the URLs to research later. Thanks, vendors!

Beyond that, I agree with everything David Coletta said.