Boy the way JesterXL spoke, code that made the hit parade, guys like us we had it made, those were the days, and you know where you were then, frameworks were Cairngorm and Flex were version 2, mister we could use a man like Mike Downey again, didn’t need no transition states everybody wrote his on MVC code, gee our old RIA ran great, those were the days!
All the other kids are writing about the first 360Flex conference and I didn’t want to be left out. :) First, lets put some perspective out there about just how long ago this was.
- We were all using the Flex2 framework.
- We thought Flex2 was, for the most part, awesome because it was written in Actionscript 3
- Flex3 beta-bits wouldn’t be available for another 3 months – June 2007
- We were almost a full year away from getting Flex 3 public release – February 25, 2008
- AIR was still called Apollo
- The beta-bits for Apollo weren’t even available yet – March 19, 2007
- A few people were using the Cairngorm framework because it was the only framework around – no, that other one doesn’t count. Nope, not that one either. :)
- Twitter was 9 months old.
On a personal note:
- I was still working for the XBox/Zune team at Microsoft. I think at this point I was prototyping the UX for Zune2.
- It would be almost a full year before Actionscript 3 was my primary language.
- I was still kicking around this idea for a website that would tell people when the best time to run and pee during a movie was. But I didn’t know any MySQL, or PHP. Actually, I didn’t really know how a database even worked or where to start.
- videoMaru was my claim to fame.
I had just barely played around with Flex2 before the conference so I was totally out of my element. Here I was, writing mostly AS2 code in the Flash IDE – ewww, it just makes me shiver to think back on that – and I’m talking to guys that make their own operating systems for fun. But I soaked up everything I could because I could tell that Flex was going to become a major part of my life in the near future. Never would have guessed just how major.
What I got most out of the conference was a sense of perspective about what was out there for me to learn and what it would take to get there and most importantly what I would be able to do once I did learn all this new stuff.
I was the only developer on my team at XBox. And I had only ever met one other Actionscript developer – the guy I replaced at XBox who overlapped with me for about 1 week. Peers are very important for people to grow and explore their knowledge and creativity. And I think for most of us attending the conference there was a feeling of isolation from the Actionscript developer community. That’s not surprising because about the only source that tied us together was the MXMA feed.
It seemed to me that the majority of the people at the conference were completely jazzed to be there. And it was the feeling of community that we were starting to feel that we didn’t want to go away. Fortunately there was this Twitter thing that most of us started using just before or during the conference. So even though we were spread across the globe we could still keep in touch. And that’s what makes going back to 360Flex so great. It’s the closest thing I have to a family reunion.
The highlight of the conference for me was when I was showing a few guys how my videoMaru code worked – if you’re unfamiliar with videoMaru then watch the 90 second video below. So while I’m showing them how it works Eli Greenfield walks up behind me – I had no idea who he was at the time. He watches for a minute and says, “That’s cool. Were working on something like that at Adobe.” I think that turned out to be Catalyst/Flex4. I’m not saying that videoMaru had any influence on them but it was incredibly validating to me that I came up with a solution to a problem that the Flex team was also exploring.
There was one other big development that happened during the conference that helped bring the Flex community together. Adobe hired this guy from Seattle named Ryan Stewart. His work at Adobe as the RIA Evangelist gave us a familiar face to connect with. I think we all knew him so his blog became the primary source of news in the RIA world for us. And if you meet Ryan at a conference then you’ll really come to understand the term social butterfly. This guy knows everyone and I think he probably has a beer with everyone, or at least he’d like to. :)
If you’re on the fence about going to 360Flex in March and especially if you have never been to one before then here’s my pitch to get you there: Being at 360Flex makes it very easy to become a member of the Flex community. Forget all the great sessions. Just hanging out in the hallways and going out late at night at the bar with the other attendees makes it more than worth the time and money it takes to get there. You’ll learn things during the sessions for sure but that’s not the best part. You’ll get back home and feel like you got zapped with 1.21 Gigawatts of creativity. You’re going to add a whole bunch of people to your twitter stream and you’ll probably start blogging a bit more than usual – or start a blog. But you’ll also work harder on those personal projects you’ve been kicking around. So the time and money that goes into getting to 360Flex is chump-change compared to the value you can get out of it. So I’ll see you there, right?
