360 from my point of View

Last week was 360Flex and it was amazing. Talk about a place to meet all the movers and shakers in the Flex community along with getting down and dirty with some Flex specifics. Let me outline my experience for you all and also share what information I can. I’ll also be making sure to include the slides where possible and my own resources from my presentations.

Day 0:
Sunday Derek and I flew into Indianapolis just in time to miss the BugQuash being held at 360Flex with keynote from Adobe’s Assistant Product Manager, the charming, Vera Carr. Upon arriving at the Crown Plaza that held the conference Derek and I quickly dropped off our materials and luggage and went to the Rock Bottom Brewery where the after session social events took place every evening. If you want to know where to go to meet some of the biggest man’s in Flex development, go to the bar during 360Flex. After having drinks and playing pull with some people from Adobe and other companies we went out for a late dinner and back to the hotel to get some sleep and prepare for the next day.

Day 1:
Monday we got up early and made it to the keynote presented by Matt Chotin over Flex, ColdFusion, and the integration of Flash Catalyst. After the keynote we moved on to our sessions starting with “addEventListener, now what” that went over the specifics about events and dispatching events. Following that I went to a session held by Effective UI titled “Clients are stupid”. This was an excellent presentation on user experience and working with clients. I followed this up by watching a presentation on the excellent ESRI mapping solution and then was able to get down deep and dirty with Collections as presented by Mike Labriola.

Derek and I rounded out our day going back to the Rock Bottom Brewery and splitting for the night so I could practice my presentation for in the morning.

Day 2:
Day 2 started with a mediocre presentation on Cloud Computing. Mediocre only because of how long the presenter defined terms and solutions for cloud computing rather than how Flex works with cloud computing. After words I was able to see some of the new features in the newly released Axxis Advanced Data Visualization library followed by Jeff Tapers presentation on “How not to Code a Flex Application”. This was an excellent writeup for new developers wanting to know best practices for Flex development.

After this presentation I gave my presentation on “The Business Side of Flex” where I explained some techniques on how to maximize your savings and profits from a Flex RIA along with some techniques for communicating with clients on any development project.

After my presentation I skipped the last session of the day and instead relaxed as I prepared for that evening’s reception and the next day’s presentation.

Day 3:
I was one of the (un)lucky developers to start the third day’s presentation at the same time as Doug Mccune and his presentation “Cool Shit”. I still feel that the people that came to my session learned plenty and was really able to see how to create their own corporate library, add asdocs, build the asdocs with ant, and finally deploy the library with their swf as a Runtime Shared Library (RSL). The included classes used for this presentation are available here (UnitedMindset Library).

After my session I watched two more sessions before the end of the conference about Merapi and Pixel Bender. The Merapi presentation by Adam Flater was really excellent and so was the Pixel Bender presentation, though I don’t know when I would use the Pixel Bender library.

That was it, that was the entirety of my time at 360Flex and my experiences there. I highly recommend for people to go if you get a chance.