On a related note about conferences, 360Flex is one of 3 major Flex conferences that happens in the year. The next one coming up is in Washington, D.C. during the month of May. It’s Webmaniacs 2008

Personally, I would not attend this one for myself because there isn’t enough new content to warrant going again but I have to say it was a really really good experience. I would recommend this conference to anyone who has an interest on enhancing their current Flex interests regardless of what level you are at. The 3rd major conference is the Adobe MAX conference. It’s the industry equivalent to those Steve Jobs/Bill Gates presentations in front of a massive big screen and there are lots of clapping, ooohs and ahhhs. Big announcements are made on that big stage. The early bird price for that one last year was $1,095.

I have to say conferences as such are not critical to what we do at the place I work at. However, they expose developers to ideas they would normally would not be exposed to in their workplace. If some of us go, it helps everybody. However, it’s unlikely to have everybody go. It is very possible for someone to be an adept Flex developer without going to expensive conferences using community resources like:

- Flexcoders Mailing List
- Macromedia XML News Aggregator
- LiveDocs

There you have it, all my secrets that I frequent the most!

In total, I’ve gone to two conferences and this was the better of the two considering that I am more a coder than a designer. For $250USD, not only did I walk away with new Flex techniques to exercise, we all got catered and went home with some nice goodies.

The following is my retail guestimates of the stuff that I received as well as a guess of the dollar value that I ate.

Yay to free stuff!

$5 - Catered Monday Breakfast consisting of danishes, bagels, and muffins. All fresh and all dee-lish. I believe it was catered by St. Germain catering. It was a surprise and a great way to start the day!

$10 - Binder of some (not all) of the presentations’ slides so that we could annotate them or preview the ones that weren’t booked. Very pretty, very handy, and very valuable for post conference recapping.

$3 - Staples 8.5 x 11in notepad cause serious learners take notes

$1 - Fig Leaf branded Sharpie marker

50c - Fig Leaf branded Pen

$1 - Fig Leaf training and services propaganda

$10 - Fig Leaf water bottle with mountain climber style clip. Very cool!

$45 - O’Reilly Programming Flex 2 which is a book not necessarily on it’s way out in the advent of Flex 3 Beta.

25c - Trial copy of Flex to pass to a friend/coworker cause Flexmaniacs attendees already use Flex.

$8 - Catered Monday Lunch - I coined this as an “American Bento Box” which is a choice of sandwiches packed with fresh fruit, chips and a sweet cookie.

Under that sandwich was a freshly baked cookie and utensils, right on.

$6 - Catered Tuesday Breakfast - Same spread as before, same baked freshness!

$8 - Catered Tuesday Lunch - More American Bento Boxes. No complaints for freshness.

BONUS! $15 - Eye Street Software branded 1GB USB Key from attending Jim Robson

Estimated Total Free Stuff = $112.75!

Conference organizers knew how to start the day right and how to keep the energy going.

Some of the presentations had some Flex ’smartie pants’ in the crowd that liked getting airtime. I hope some day that those guys get confident enough to launch their own presentations. I’m all for more presenters, more topics and more tracks.

Please keep in mind that everything mentioned so far is secondary to the objective of learning more Flex stuff. I didn’t travel from Toronto, Canada just to collect very nice swag. I hope in my next post to share my thoughts in the presentations and how I found it useful for what I do.

Big it up to the organizers and presenters for providing a great east-coast Flex conference!

Center piece of the Courtyard where we ate lunch