Adobe Max – The Gaucho’s Review

Saturday
MAX09 started for me Saturday at 4pm when I received an email from Matt Chotin informing me that one of the MAX Presenters had fallen ill and asked if I could fill in. Of course I said yes, not knowing the next 48 hours in store for me.

On the flight I sat next to Brian Burck and Rebecca Shaw while working through my slides for the Tuesday presentation. Once in LA we were a quick taxi ride away from the Westin and the Westin’s lobby a.k.a. party central every night for MAX attendees. Do you want to meet the community’s biggest and brightest? Come to the hotel lobby and prepare to spend the night talking about Adobe Technologies. We stayed up late having our drinks and preparing for the week, coming up Sunday.

Sunday
Sunday started with a great breakfast at the Westin’s restaurant and off to the conference for Community Summit. This is a great time once a year that all the Community Leaders (Experts and Managers) are able to get together and discuss the the “State of Community” and how to make it better. FYI, this next year is going to be a great year for the Adobe Community. After lunch though I knew my play time was over and I met up with Jun Heider to discuss the presentation we were going to present at MAX. He had to head back to helping out with a Sunday class and I kept going on the presentation while the Miller and Associate boys kept setting up the wall for MAX.

After a few hours zoomed by on the amazing mac, it was time to put down work and go get some fun in.

All the Community Managers headed out to a local bar and then a few of us snuck away to go to the Lucky Lanes for some late night bowling. We capped the night off back at the hotel lounge and off to bed. Next up, Day One Keynote with all the newest technology finally being shown off.

Monday
Monday, first thing, Keynote:

If you weren’t there though what you missed was a sneak peak of the new movie, Avatar. I already can’t wait for this movie, it is beautiful! The one thing that I found funny was when the presenter said “all this was digital”. Really? REALLY? Like we didn’t guess that the 60 ft tall monsters and 10 ft tall blue humanoids weren’t real?

Time to get to the first sessions. First up, Matt Bugbee and Danny Dura talking about MultiTouch with the Flash Platform.
This presentation really was amazing, but at the end it was time to get back to work, I was 24 hours away from presenting at 360|Flex and MAX. We were running out of time. Jun and I snuck away to the Speakers Lounge and did nothing but work on the presentation. Quick special thanks to Ely and the Flex team for offering some recommended points to the presentation.

Hours slipped away and it was again party time. Monday night is the sponsors party, a great time to meet the different sponsors and talk to many different developers. I was there at the Miller and Associates booth for a while before escaping back to the hotel lobby with my mac to finish up some demos for the presentation. Ending at around 3 am I grabbed a few hours of sleep and was ready for MAX day 2.

Tuesday
Tuesday started with my 9am 360|Flex presentation on Ruby on Rails with Flex. The presentation went well and I really think that I convinced a few people that Ruby on Rails with Flex is a good thing. But there was barely a moment to be happy about a successful presentation. Instead it was time to head to Keynote Day 2.

Seeing what others have done within the Community was great to see. Next up, Birds of a Feather. A time to sit and discuss with other community members about specific subjects, my topic “Get over your fear of frameworks”. We discussed different Flex frameworks and benefits to using frameworks within your Flex development cycles. Nice talk, thanks to all that showed up.

I ran from the Birds of a Feather, to the MAX presentation: Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and AIR.

You know what is great about getting all of your presentations done? No stress and time let lose and PARTY. Right after my presentations I grabbed a few people that I passed by and we went for some mid-afternoon drinks. Stress free life is great.

After changing for the MAX bash we ran back to the conference to catch the can’t miss sneaks and this year Adobe delivered with some amazing sneaks. After the sneaks though Adobe put out the balloons which we know what that means “PARTY OVER HERE!” The MAX Bash was awesome, taking up an entire city block we partied hard from the Conga Room, to ESPN Zone, Rock and Roll Museum, and Lucky Strike Bowling. Great night. A few of us snuck away and headed to Hollywood Boulevard. It was a great night that ended back at the hotel lobby with a camera and some Leia ear muffs provided by Ely. Check out the embarrassing evidence http://princessleiabadhairday.com/.

Wednesday
Wednesday felt like the first day I was able to enjoy and yet I only had till noon before running out to the airport and back to Dallas. The morning was spent just meeting some good folks and heading to the Pantry with Miller folks, great food – try it.

MAX just went by way to fast and yet, it was still wonderful. I can’t wait till next year!