The Joy of Flex

What was great:

• Tom and John. These guys are off the hook. They were at their desk every time I walked by, answering questions and helping people. Their positive attitudes were totally infectious. They amazed me repeatedly with their ambition and ability to get stuff done. One quick example: they videotaped all the talks, and plan to make the videos available for download, DRM-free, in a few weeks. And they already had half of them encoded by the last day of the conference! I don’t know if they have a long term plan for world domination, or are just doing things right by instinct, but they’re doing just what I’d do if I had a five or ten year strategy to totally own the “small high-value technical conference” brand.
• Power strips and WiFi in all the conference rooms. The WiFi was spotty but it worked well enough, and better than at other conferences I’ve been at.
• Small size of conference. This whole idea of 360 attendees is pretty great. The conference feels small enough so you can get to know a lot of people, find someone in particular you’re looking for, and hold the whole thing in one regular sized hotel without having to make people hike around a lot.
• Great opportunity for new speakers. This was my first time speaking at a conference about Flex, and my first time speaking about anything in quite a few years. It was a great warm up opportunity for more talks I’m giving at MAX in Chicago in six weeks.
• Food, bar, etc. It was great to be able to get a drink at the open bar after the conference and keep talking about stuff, and the lunch lines were always short and the food good.

Room for improvement:

• There was a good variety of talks: some focused on technical information or training while others showcased a particular product (and some, like mine, crossed back and forth). Some were fairly advanced while others were for beginners. I would have liked there to be more advanced topics. Also, the 101/201/301 labels were ok, but it was hard to know exactly what that meant. In my experience the 201-labeled sessions were still pretty basic. But I applaud the effort to use the labels and I expect this will get better over time.
• There were quite a few Adobe people at the conference, but I would have liked there to be more, and I would have liked them to give more talks. I guess this is another way of saying I wish there was a lot more under-the-hood technical material. And I’ll take some blame for this myself: I had intended to cover at least three times as much Buzzword code as I actually had time for, but I think I was going just about as fast as possible.
• I’m not sure how many conference speakers knew that they had 80-minute time slots. I didn’t know myself, and many speakers seemed surprised. Some talks seemed to kind of peter out around the 60-minute mark, which gave us longer breaks, but left me wondering if there could have been more material covered.

There was a lot more to the conference than I’ve mentioned above. I didn’t even talk about the charity code jam or the parties! Overall, I’d say that this conference was well worth attending, that it’ll get steadily better over time, and that I’m definitely going to have to figure out how to convince our CEO to let me go to Milan next year!

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