360Flex wrap up
Friday, April 11th, 2008
Thursday morning, just as I was about to press “publish”, my swisscom *cough*RIPOFF*cough* connection CUT OFF. So, one day late, my highlights:
Sunday
- Step off the plane, get immediately ripped off by some dodgy taxi, good start! (When I say ripped off, I mean an expensive, yet scenic drive through Milan instead of the 5 minutes it took me on my way back :swear: )
- Arrive at hotel just after dinner was finished, but in time to meet the organizers and some of the guys. I think the ‘open mood’ for discussion (which prevailed the entire conference) kicked off here.
- Played a game of pool at the hotel bar… The Finnish/French alliance (Cyril and I) pretty much pwned and humiliated the Flemish/Italian one (Koen and Marco ) :pirate: Good Times
Monday
- After the keynote I saw Michael Labriolas “Dense and Hot: An Introduction to your applications start up”. I had read some rave reviews about his presentation in Atlanta, and the session (to be honest) did get me quite Dense and HOTT
oh: . I’d say it was the most entertaining presentation of the entire conference, but also amongst the most informative. Michael put some fairly complex ideas into easily digestible slides… thumbsup! - I also saw Marco and his Colleague Mattia give a talk about the combination of Flex and Ajax. Ajax isn’t really my cup of tea, but connecting to the html/js side of things is necessary from time to time. I found this a useful and well prepared session.
- Following the sessions, I spent the rest of the day in my hotel room, polishing up my own presentation. And when I say polishing up my own presentation I mean working on one ridiculous example…
Tuesday
- My own presentation. I was quite happy with what I had prepared, I had already test driven it once at nascom. What I wasn’t ready for was the 600×400 resolution on the beamer
With awaiting eyes on me, live, I actually edited y positions of display objects to make my examples somewhat intelligible. This kind of screwed my flow, but I got some positive feedback later on so I guess I managed… like I said, anyone can deliver slides, it takes a REAL MAN to jump back and forth from Powerpoint to Flexbuilder, and actually do some coding in between . Thanks cyril for the photo (above) - If I felt bad about my troubles, such feelings quickly vanished while enjoying Neil Webbs Cairngorm presentation. Neil had no technical difficulties. As a matter of fact his presentation was quite brilliant, and very very funny, only, it seemed I was the only one laughing at his jokes Truly, I’ve never seen such good humor fall on deaf ears… cultural differences I suppose
- Tuesday night was well spent at the hotel lobby. They stopped serving drinks, but the conversation flowed… I don’t think I’ll ever forget Tomislav Pokrajcic and his “Croatian Saying”
Wednesday
- I was disappointed by the cancellation of Ivan “the Mars Spider” Zambanellos presentation. With a name like “Mars Spider”, who wouldn’t be disappointed? This was easily made up for by Rostislav Hristovs presentation about SWFAddress. I will certainly be looking at SWFAddress and his examples again, particularly the wordpress example. And, thanks for the T-Shirt!!!
- In the afternoon I checked out Christo Jolif talking about the ILOG Elixir components. It was very nice to see him do some live coding. The products are rock solid. A little expensive. But rock solid.
- Dan Thomas was The final speaker of the conference… This turned out to be a fantastic presentation. It started off with Dan just listing “best practices”. I’m not sure if it was 100% intentional, but the presentation turned into a kind of an open forum, lead and moderated by Dan. Lots of great input from Neil, Robin, Michael and Sam
As promised, my slides and examples can be downloaded from here (warning, 16 megs, apologies for not optimizing my ppt images).
HUUUUUUUUGE thanks to both John and Tom, you guys ROCK!!!
All in all, I learned a lot, made a lot of new contacts and I hope to see all of you again at random occasions at random locations :buttrock:
