360Flex + $480 = lots of learnin’ and lots of fun
The awesome guys from 360Conferences have just announced that the next installment of 360Flex will be an even better deal than it already was. They are offering a full day of Flex 101 training the day before the conference begins, meaning even if you have no Flex experience whatsoever, you can spend 4 days in Hotlanta and come out with some serious knowledge. Back in August I went to my first ever tech conference: 360Flex in Seattle. I was immediately hooked. The small size combined with great sessions makes for a really amazing conference and community experience, and for their prices you really can’t beat it. They charge approximately 50% of what most other conferences do.
So do yourself a favor and head to 360Flex in February. Whether you’re a Flex n00b, novice or ninja it will be worth your time and your career will probably thank you for it. I hear they even have some pretty sweet new speakers this time around. :)
See you in Atlanta!
on December 13th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
that’s -480 you cheap hack.
on December 14th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
I tried to leave this comment earlier, but my crackberry didn’t show me the captcha.
We’re thrilled to be doing this and we hope to have others participate as well! Keep an eye on the conference, we have a lot of things planned. :)
on December 17th, 2007 at 1:23 am
Conferences are a waste of time and money for both the user base as well as their respective employers, unless one counts drinking as worthwhile expenditure of company resources.
Moreover, conferences deify a few ‘industry leads’ with relatively minor accomplishments and charge exorbitantly on forgettable ‘lessons’. This is parasitic to the growth/legitimacy of the platform as a whole.
and Ben, (since you’ll probably delete this comment) let me be the first to tell you to de-register your blog from MXNA and advertise elsewhere.
on December 17th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
OK Xiaolei, I’m intrigued enough to approve your comments now. (I deleted his first comment on this post that read something along the lines of “thats -480, not +480″ because I felt it added nothing to the discussion at hand.) Your second comment shows quite a bit about your professionalism, so I’ve included that for good measure. Before delving into your 3rd and most puzzling comment, let me address your beef with my pseudo-math. I suppose I understand that you’re implying that attending 360Flex will leave your bank account with $480 less than it had before but, unsurprisingly, you’ve missed the spirit of the post. What the title implies (not so subtly I might add) is this: if one were to take $480 and the attendance of the 360Flex event as inputs, the result is likely to be a significantly improved base of Flex knowledge and a few days of good times. I dare say my original title is catchier and more readable.
Now lets address your latest comment. While you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, implying that drinking is all that happens at a conference is simply not true. I can say without a doubt that the things I learned and the connections I made at 360Flex have made me a significantly better Flex developer than I was before. Regarding “industry leads”, there are definitely some people whose names are better known than others but I would hardly call them deified. The conference environment was very casual and every well known person I met was very approachable, down to earth and normal. Additionally, people that are well known generally get that way for a reason and have earned whatever reputation they enjoy. Your comment about any of these aspects being parasitic to the platform are flat out ludicrous as conferences and visible members of the community are a great way for the platform to expand and gain visibility. I can safely say Adobe agrees with me or they wouldn’t be putting on their own conferences and sponsoring others including 360Flex.
Regarding my blog on MXNA, if you don’t like it don’t read it. Nobody forced you to click that link. In closing, I’m sorry if you’ve attended conferences and forgotten the lessons, not made any friends and found yourself jealous of the people with name recognition but if your “cheap hack” comment is any indication of your personality and professionalism I can’t say I’m surprised.
on September 22nd, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I found ‘08 360Flex in San Jose to be a waste of my company’s money, and unfortunately tend to agree with Xiaolei’s sentiments.
What made this 360Flex particularly bad was the low quality of the sessions. Half the ones I attended had two problems:
1) The material was basic in the extreme. Even a cursory glance at the relevant Flex 3 Developers Guide chapter would provide better understanding.
2) The presenter didn’t know the material very well. This made question & answer time excruciating (did you attend the ItemRenderers & ItemEditors session?).
Not all sessions were that bad, but, boy, was I disappointed. You’d think a talk about BlazeDS would cover more than “These are the configuration files,” wouldn’t you? There was a “project workflow” talk that advertised itself as being about Ant (at least partly), but you got nothing more than “You should use Ant” and a list of management cliches (such as “Make your people realize you care about them.” Ack.).
Such conferences are enormously fun, it’s true. It was wonderful to be out of the office for a while, have a few beers, meet and chat with colleagues, etc. No question about it. In fact, it is so fun, I believe most people give their bosses glowing reports of the usefulness of the conference.
But my honest opinion is most of these shows are a waste, due to poor-quality sessions. More meaningful material, and better presenter preparation, would do much to change this (and not diminish the fun factor, either).
on September 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Hey Marc,
Sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy the conference. I will definitely point Tom and John to your comment because I am sure they want all feedback, not just the positive they usually seem to get.
I actually wasn’t feeling great most of the conference so didn’t attend as many sessions as I would have liked. Of the ones I did attend though, 3 in particular stood out for me. I mentioned them at http://www.returnundefined.com/2008/08/the-obligatory-360flex-recap-and-my-presentation-files, so I would encourage you to check them out on AMP if you didn’t attend.
The only other thing I will say, as I don’t want to try and dispute your opinion of your experience, is that a lot of the sessions being somewhat basic is something a fair amount of people have noticed. Including the event organizers. While that can be frustrating for those of us who are more advanced, I have also noticed that a lot of 360|Flex attendees seem to be people just getting started with Flex, or people coming to find out what its all about. I think as time goes by and the developer base matures you will start to see more advanced topics being covered. From what I hear, there is a specific focus on advanced topics for 360|MAX in November.
Again, sorry you were disappointed and I hope you will give 360|Flex another chance in the future. Hey, if nothing else you will at least have fun and drink some beers right? :)
on September 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I’ve attended a few 360s and a few MAX conferences, and yes, I did return to my employer with glowing reviews. But… to be honest… I think I attended (sober) maybe 3-4 sessions… if that… at each. The glowing review was (as Marc put it) to make sure they’d send me again.
With that said, I can’t put enough emphasis on the quality of contacts and networking that these conferences provide. Let’s be honest… if you want to learn Ant, pull up Google or open a book. This is a major reason I don’t attend/pay attention in most sessions because yeah, the content is often dumbed down, and you may only get a few “tidbits” of information from them.
I actually presented at the 360Flex Seattle conference (to mixed reviews admittedly) and I tried my damnedest to create a topic I thought would be “interesting”…. something you couldn’t pull off a blog or out of a book (until I posted the content after the presentation of course :-)
So yeah… my point is that I go to conferences to meet the people… and I suspect a lot of others do as well.
on September 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I’ll address the least constructive
@Xiaolei,
I’m curious if you’ve ever attended a conference, let alone a 360|Flex.
I can’t argue with what people tell their employers, nor do I know what they tell them, but I’d love your opinion on conferences that cost as much as 3x ours.
As for the deification of presenters, I’d say you’re not very in touch with the community since the most “popular” folks in the industry, the ones Adobe loves to pay to speak and travel around, aren’t at our events. We don’t believe in supporting big egos, nor to we cater to them in any way, even when we get the obligatory, “Where’s Grant Skinner” email.
@Marc
Sorry you didn’t like the sessions you attended. Mary, the itemRenderer presenter, was definitely a first time presenter. We support first time presenters (Xiaolei, we agree, a small group a superstars aren’t good for the platform or community) in an effort to help increase the Flex talent worldwide. Her session was 200 level, maybe it shoulda been 100. You had the ability to get up and select a new session.
I can’t change your mind, and won’t try, but I disagree. As some one who has paid to attend conferences much more expensive than 360|Flex, I know it’s the event I’d rather attend as a Flex developer. Tom and I created an event that we’d attend.
That said, we do take all feedback, good and bad, to heart, and will strive to make our future events better than the ones that come before them. Xiaolei if you’d like to attend one of our events, I’d love to say hi. Marc same to you. I’m sorry you didn’t have a good experience.
We are planning for 360|MAX to be more advanced, than typical MAX conferences in the past. If either of you (doubtful I’d guess) are attending MAX, make sure to come by and say hello.
on September 26th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Thanks for the responses; my comments seem too harsh, in retrospect. Had I the ability to do it, I’d rewrite them less strongly worded. Certainly I could have made the suggestion that the sessions could be more technical without pointing out specific sessions that irked me.
In fairness, I didn’t pay attention to the difficulty level of the particular sessions I attended. Thanks, John, for pointing that out.
I sympathize with the first-time presenter you pointed out. I would have done (and have done) a worse job speaking before groups.
@Brendan: “Let’s be honest… if you want to learn Ant, pull up Google or open a book.” Heh. Good point. If I hadn’t done that already, the sessions would have seemed advanced, indeed!
To be fair, a few coworkers disagree with me as well. Perhaps I just was unlucky in my session selection.
To say something positive, I felt the Flex 101 session (presented by the Lynda.com teacher) was very professionally done. While basic, it was well done and what you’d expect from a “101″ course. The guy was very good.