Hey Alex. It was good to see you again at the conference.
I have a few thoughts about the conference and thoughts on the lower attendance. Looking back to when I first attended Flex 360 when it was hosted in San Jose I think the sessions on Flex were much more advanced in topics and provided me with more knowledge about Flex. From sessions about the elastic racetrack to Flash player garbage collection I always came away with a better understanding of the Flex framework. I think there are so many Flex developers who could benefit from additional advanced topics. Maybe it would even encourage new developers to take advantage of application building with Flex. I also know for a fact this is the case from the dozens and dozens of Flex candidate interviews I have performed over the past year. Many developers lack the fundamental understanding of Flex. The other thing I've noticed is that there is a perception that the conference is a web conference with a btw we might talk about 1 or 2 things about Flex. Seeing the available sessions doesn't disprove my poi t. Just my 2 cents. Thanks, Russ On Aug 9, 2013, at 11:31 AM, "Alex Harui" @adobe.com> wrote: > The 360|Stack conference was held in Denver from August 4-7, 2013. > Attendance was lower than last year, leaving many of wondering why. Was it > that the conference was in the summer instead of spring? Was the name change > a factor? > > 360|Stack intended to remain the primary (only) Flex conference in the world. > And it did seem like the majority of attendees were current or former Flex > users. The schedule of talks included more non-Flex content than past years, > but that's on purpose: some folks are migrating away from Flex. > > But I chatted with many attendees who are not immediately migrating. These > folks seem to have significant Flex-based applications, and they are > definitely considering how to migrate their apps going forward, but many feel > like they have another year or two before they have to start migrating, and > all were encouraged to see that FlexJS is a potential option. > > I think my presentations went ok. There wasn't shouts of joy at seeing MXML > and AS run in the browser without Flash, but the feedback was positive and > there nothing was brought up to make me want to make significant changes in > the direction we're headed in, so it is time to start preparing for a 0.1 > release. > > I didn't attend too many other sessions because I was prepping slides and I > did have some extensive sit-downs with a few Flex customers. I got one > attendee up and running on FlexJS which took a bit longer than expected. We > need to make it easier to get it going. But Michael Labriola and Michelle > Yaiser never fail to give good inspiring talks. > > My biggest takeaway, though, was that folks are not able to keep up with what > is going on with Apache Flex. Even many of our fellow committers and PMC > members were essentially unaware that FlexJS had a prototype to play with. > The complaint I heard over and over again is that there is just too much > traffic on the dev mailing list and folks are too busy to keep up with it. > We are using [] tags to make it easier to filter, but that means folks still > have to take the time to set up a filter. We need a better way of > communicating important things besides releases in a lower-traffic way. > Maybe we should blog/tweet certain things slightly more often, or maybe we > should have our own announce@ list. Other ideas welcome. > > -Alex >
