360Flex – Speaker Leonard Souza

Leonard Souza has spoken at several 360|Flex about several things, and we’re really happy to have him back in DC speaking about “Flexerific Visual effects” on Tuesday.

Whether you’re a developer at a company with designers or not, this session is a great place to get an idea of how to build out visual effects in Flex, and exactly what is and isn’t possible to do.

Q: How long have you been working with Flex?

A: Since the early days of Flex 2, which was about 4 years ago. I had been a heavy user of flash for years and really needed a stronger development platform.

That seems fairly common, those in the community that were more developer than designer, flocked to Flex from the Flash IDE.

Q: What do you like most about Flex?

A: Its ability to integrate extremely rich visual interactions with enterprise conventions. I have never seen a better tool for this. It has been engineered from the ground up to empower developers and designers in any vertical.

My first experiences with Flex were building rich front ends to enterprise (very NOT rich) systems. Flex really is in a class of it’s own in that space!

Q: What 1 session are you most excited about seeing at 360|Flex DC?

A: Doug McCune’s keynote, which will be worth the price of admission alone (no pressure Doug, just sayin’). Ben Stucki never disappoints as well.

I’m actually really excited to watch Doug keynote! His presentation at RIAdventure really inspired me, and I knew then that he’d be an awesome keynoter, and just what 360|Flex needed to galvanize the crowd and send them out into sessions ready to kick ass and take names.

Q: What about 360|Flex DC are you most excited about?

A: The people. I have so much fun at this event it’s practically a vacation. The D.C. area is one of my favorites as well.

Awesome! I think so too! Once the planning is done, and we’re all together, it’s time to relax, learn and enjoy the best of the community!

Q: Do you prefer ninjas or robots?

A: Well that all depends on the context. Am I in command them? Or battling them? If there are pirates involved, then I have no comment.

Pirates are a major wildcard, more so if they’re ICE PIRATES!

Q: What is one thing you’d like to see improved in the Flex Framework?

A: Hardware acceleration and multi-threading (couldn’t keep it to one). This angers me so that I dare say I cannot speak further of it. It makes me want to unleash a legion of ninjas and robots.

HA HA

Q: Is there someone you’re hoping to see at 360|Flex DC?

A: Honestly, if my liver lasts long enough to have a conversation with one or two people all of my hopes will be met.

When it comes to 360|Flex and Livers, it’s like Robots and Ninjas!

Q: Lastly, what would you tell someone who was on the fence or hadn’t heard (I know, they’re out there though) of 360|Flex to get them to come?

A: This is a great conference for those who want to take their programming/interaction skills to the next level. You also get to hang with amazing people. It is frustrating when you have no one around to talk to about what you do (which may be the case for those in more remote positions, etc.). This is a conference where everyone is dying to talk all night about it. It is very inspiring and rejuvenates those creative urges that have been forcibly shoved aside from God knows what.

For a lot of people 360|Flex is their chance to meet folks they’ve only met online, and re-connect with friends from around the globe! It’s a great time and the chance to learn from the best in the community… well sometimes we think we charge too little :) Go register before we change our minds!!

360Flex – Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

We closed the post conference survey last night, hope you took a few minutes to participate.

Those surveys are super huge for us. They give our attendees a chance to tell us what they think of the event. Often times people are brutally honest, and we want that. If you had a terrible time, we want to know about it and make the next conference better. If you had an awesome time, we want to know that too.

Besides that type of feedback, the survey gives us some insight into our attendee demographic. That helps us with sponsorships (Adobe likes to see how many new Flex developers we help bring to the community, etc), and with stuff like food ordering (we heard you guys loud and clear on that one)  and even shirts and other swag. The survey also helps us plan for the future; locations, sizes, etc.

As a way to say thanks for doing one last small thing to help make 360|Flex better, we pick two surveys at random (using Random.org to select a row number) to give prizes to.

Hopefully next time we’ll get better than 1/3 participation in the survey, I mean, come on guys :)

Anyhoo! The winners are selected, and each has an email in their inbox, so we’ll announce them here too!

Leif Wells and Andrew Blair!

We teased in the email about getting an iPad, and we’re leaving it up to each winner to select their prize (within our budget, come on we’re not made of money, LOL)

Thanks so much to everyone who submitted a survey, we truly truly appreciate it, and to those that didn’t, shame on you :)

See you guys in about 6 months!

360Flex – Prep video from Yakov Fain!

In case you missed it before, we’ve got a contest running to win some cool stuff, including CS4, and much more!

Just make a video about 360|Flex, we’ll let folks vote, and that’s it :)

Speaker Yakov Fain is the first to make a video but it’s not too late. If we get enough videos we’ll be playing them before the keynote!

360Flex Raffle winners – Session Surveys

Wanted to put a post out so that everyone knows who won our session survey raffles. The Raffles are really important, not just to Tom and I, but (way more so) to our speakers. We pass on survey feedback (anon of course) so that the speakers can learn and make changes to their topics, get better, etc.

We didn’t do a super great job making sure everyone knew that the survey tool , which is our bad for sure, we’ll do better about that, sorry.

For those who did take the time to fill out surveys, we appreciate it, the speakers appreciate it, and we’re glad to be able to try to make it worth your while.

During lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday we did a raffle of survey results submitted so far. Their were 10 copies of Flex Builder which went to;

Dave Matchack, Mark Doberenz, Bryce Barrand, Sam Singer, Sherry Parisi, Joel Spriggs, Jay Hagenow, Arnold K. Young, Kris Arnold, and JD Schrock

Congrats to you guys, you should be hearing from Adobe very soon. The awesome gal that handles this was putting on FlashCamp last week, so it’ll probably be this week.

We also announced that one lucky attendee would win a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection. The lucky winner of that bad boy of software was David Ortinau. Congrats David! We’re getting the media and figuring out how to deliver it (it’s not a small download!)

We also had a copy of Fusion Reactor to give away and that went to Thomas Wilson

We also had a license of Flextras to give out, and two copies of Snagit and Camtasia.

Into Mobile? Looking at other RIA technologies? Check out InsideMobile and InsideRIA!

360Flex – Win a reactor, FusionReactor that is.

360|Flex is always giving away free stuff.  We  normally have books, software, etc.  Indy will be no exception.  One of the software raffles will be a free copy of FusionReactor Enterprise Server Monitor.

FusionReactor can be used to monitor Flex applications that have an under-lying Java back-end. It can also decode AMF – so you are able to see the method calls and parameters of incoming AMF requests. This is a great advantage when trying to debug the server-side of your Flex application.  And we all know how debugging an app at all levels is like manna from heaven!

FusionReactor also gives you

  • Availability and Performance Management – to proactively monitor business applications
  • Root cause analysis – identify server issues, application performance problems, slow running requests etc.
  • Unattended Monitoring – keeps servers alive in critical situations and alerts based on crash protection rules
  • Lightweight production server monitoring – with less than 1% overhead
  • Server Monitor for Rich Internet Applications - Monitoring for ColdFusion 6.1, 7, 8, LiveCycle Data Services, Flex, Adobe AIR, Blaze DS and Railo CFML – J2EE : JRUN, JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere – supported OS platforms include Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac and Unix

Since only one lucky winner will be chosen, the rest of y’all can download a free 10 day trial at http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fr/downloads.cfm

Want to hear more about the product?  Go review the Flex Show Episode on FusionReactor: http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/4/29/The-Flex-Show-Episode-72

This is just one of many prizes to be given away next week.  Register now for your chance to win.