360|Flex Random Thoughts and Observations

My co-worker, Joshua, and I have just completed our first full day of sessions at 360 Flex here in Indianapolis. So far it has been well worth it. Just some random thoughts and observations:

• The folks here are really cool and very friendly. They seem to be genuinely excited to be here.
• I’ve gotten to meet several of the guys who are working on projects that I’m either very interested in or already use. This includes folks like Juan Sanchez, Doug McCune and Ryan Campbell just to name a few. It is cool to finally put faces with names after following their blogs for such a long time.
• Indianapolis seems to be a pretty clean city and the downtown area is much more lively than I expected. There are lots of steakhouses and brew pubs.
• Renaun’s presentation on structured log testing is something I can definitely use on my projects at work. I just hope I can keep the disciplined attitude that it takes to keep my tests up-to-date.
• The enhancements coming down the pipe for Flex 4 are even more substantial than I realized. They will make writing Flex apps much more efficient. Too bad they are so vague about its availability.
• So far, Michael Labriola’s ‘Any Which Array but Loose’ has been my favorite session. He really seems to know his stuff and I learned a lot about what is really going on in the different types of arrays, vectors, bytearrays and arraycollections.
• I think Adobe initially thought that Flash Catalyst would be a great way to create Flex/Flash applications without all the messing coding. Now that it has been in development for quite some time, I think they’ve figured out that it is much better to position it as a tool for prototyping and wireframing applications and leaving the rest of the work up to the developers who want to get into the code.
• The first night here, Obama was in town. His motorcade was supposed to pass right by the hotel but I never saw it. Too bad. Would have been cool to see the limo and the whole procession first-hand.
• Every night there is a reception at the Rock Bottom Brewery. It is fun to socialize with everyone over a beer after a day of sessions.
• The presentation I’m most looking forward to is the one on OpenFlux. The outside-the-box thinking that goes into a project like this is really something else. The impact that OpenFlux and Degrafa have had on the evolution of Flex 4 is really impressive.
• This hotel is also a functioning train station. The rooms shake when a locomotive rolls through. They try to pass it off as part of the experience. My bet is that they just didn’t think it through.