ScaleNine

What a week! 360|Flex was a blast and it seems to get better at each conference. I saw a lot of familiar faces and it was a huge mix of people all interested in Flex. It’s really cool to see the way the community is progressing. It was also a great experience being an employee of EffectiveUI rather than flying solo. I was able to hang out at the EffectiveUI booth to talk about our current projects and help some trouble-shoot issues with their own projects, as well as hand out some Degrafa shirts.

The 360|Flex conference definitely had an open-source tone to it. With talk of projects like Open Flux, Merapi, FlexLib and Degrafa, it was exciting to hear how developers are grouping together to push Flex in the direction they’d like to see it go. I sat in on a session surrounding the topic of open-source projects to talk about Degrafa, as well as listen in on what others are working on.

Doug McCune and I were also able to fill in for Jesse Warden to discuss “Making it big as an independent Flex developer.” This was a great session where Doug and I just shared our experiences and thoughts on the Flex market, branding yourself, etc. I’ve never been without a full-time job, but I have done consulting work simultaneously. I think it was helpful for people to hear that you don’t have to quit your full-time job to make it. Jeffry Houser also offered up his insights, as did others. It pretty much boils down to working your ass off.

For me, Wednesday was the most exciting day of the conference. Probably because I got to attend the most sessions on that day. The day kicked off with some time where members of the community got to share what they were working on. Again, there was a few open-source projects mentioned, I got to plug my session on Degrafa, and we all got a sneak peek at what other’s were working on.

By my session, on the last day and time, I was pretty fried, but I was excited to share Degrafa with those who hadn’t heard of it and discuss some of the new features in the new beta release. Ben Stucki and Pavan Podila were there to field technical questions and comment on some of the new features. I was able to hang out a bit after my session to answer more questions, but then headed to the airport in a hurry.

So, 360|Flex rocked! The very next day I left in a car for Colorado and am now officially in downtown Denver, a couple miles from the EffectiveUI offices. Needless to say, it’s been a hectic and exciting week.

Here’s the slides from my session. The examples I showed will be available soon as samples on the Degrafa site.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under conferences, presentations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.