360|Flex Day One: Straight to the Nitty-Gritty

by Dana Tierney, Senior Editor

"I thought about ten people would show up," said Joel Hooks apologetically, pulling out Robotlegs T-shirts and stickers at the end of his half-day session introducing the framework. Several times that many developers swarmed up front for the swag, and a dozen stayed to hang out and ask questions afterwards.

The San Jose 360|Flex Conference opened on March 7, with sessions that got right down to code.

Garth Braithwaite ran an all-day Flex 101 tutorial, heavily attended by laptop-wielding newbies with many questions about namespaces and setting up a project.

If you have ever wanted to control an LED display using Flex, you would have been fascinated by Justin Mclean's presentation on Arduino, an open source hardware design platform and programming language.

I flitted between sessions, so it wouldn't really be fair to attempt to review these sessions individually, especially since they had different goals and audiences, and some were more polished and tested presentations than others. Most of the people in the sessions though, seemed to have learned a lot by the time they ended, and many of them had been coaxed through all the steps of the tutorials. The others seemed happy.

The hit of the day was the hot hot chutney and the cold German beer the organizers were serving, but what developer is surprised by that?

Dana Tierney is the Senior Editor at House of Fusion, where she causes authors to cry over their once-thought perfect articles. They recover, and their articles are better for it. But still, the sound of grown men weeping...

• Subscribe
• RSS

• Editorial
• Specials
• Community
• News
• Tech and Tags
• Views
• Reviews
• Techniques
• Security
• Best of ColdFusion Talk
• Knowledge Base
• Blog Watch

• Tipical Charlie