360Flex – Things you’ll see in DC – Part 1

We’re hard at work locking in great sponsors (see two of them below), and awesome content, and I wanted to share a little with everyone.

Keynotes

Obviously monday’s keynote will be something to not miss. Not only will Adobe be giving us a peak at what’s new/hot/coming soon, but we’re handing over the mic, and the room to Doug McCune.

Sure we all know Doug from “Cool Shit” at Indianapolis, and plenty of other awesome, if not always child friendly sessions, but he’s also ridiculously smart, and a great speaker (Check out his RIAdventure talk, and tell me it’s not motivating). 360|Flex since the beginning has opened with more staid keynotes. Adobe (Ebay when we’re there) giving more state of the union style talks, previews, etc. I’d like to change that.

While we don’t want to completely move away from that, we do want to start raising the bar in the community, for events. Deepa is awesome, and I hope she come to DC to wow us (Check out her keynote from 360|Flex San Jose, it’s free just put it in the cart), but I think it’d be cool to get the community jazzed about what we do. We’re not stodgy old programmers building dashboards, and Web service front ends. We’re doing cool things! Let’s talk about that! Let’s talk about what isn’t done but is possible. Let’s talk about what isn’t possible and how that’s not stopping us!

360|Flex is first and foremost a community event. Organized by members of the community, supported by the community, and aimed at increasing the size of the Flex developer community. Adobe wants 1mil. Flex Developers, we want to help. We also want 360|Flex (and this I think we’ve succeeded at) to be the place where developers come to get knowledge, experience and face time, with things and people they wouldn’t otherwise. Every tried to find someone you didn’t know personally at MAX, not easy. We want everyone leaving 360|Flex on Wednesday to be so energized, they go back to work Thursday or Friday ready to “Crush It!” Ready to go to their bosses, co-workers, etc and show them the things they learned, the new ways of debugging, the new way to compile large apps faster, etc.

General Sessions

If you were in San jose, you got a taste of this, we had some awesome panels! This time around we’re not doing panels (Not for lack of interest, a lack of submissions, LOL) but rather are doing more themed general sessions. Ben Stucki, will be talking about “The Art of Computer Science”, Chuck Freedman is holding “The Great Framework Debate”, and Antonio Holguin is talking about User Experience and mobile. Mobile is growing! I expect the next 360|Flex to have a much higher AIR for mobile showing, and can’t wait!

We’re more than just coders and designers!

And no, i don’t mean some bastard love child of the two! Devigners, desoders, whatever. I mean, we’re interesting people! To highlight that we’re gonna have more than just Rock Band during the evening one night. Jun, Eric, and Scott AKA the compilers will be performing one night (Still TBD). They’ll also be doing a lunch session, talking about how their band incorporates technology into the sets. It’s rumored (Nothing solid yet) that 22nd Century, band of Adobe Evangelist Duane Nickull will be on site as well, and maybe even a little live DJ action from an old friend :)

I don’t want 360|Flex to turn into a “Festival” there’s enough of those out there, but I do think there’s room for more interesting stuff than what we’ve offered before.

Go register… right now! Do it, click this link, register, and secure your spot. Then go book your hotel, it’ll be THE place to be. Why cab/walk/whatever to another hotel, when you can be in the event hotel. I can’t stress enough how much better an experience it is to be in hotel of the conference.

Go on! Register! See you in DC!