Flash Forward Boston and MAX Chicago Review

Well, I guess it’s about time I write up my retrospectives on Flash Forward and MAX.

Flash Forward was held in Boston earlier last month. I had done a bit of criticizing of the conference beforehand due to the pricing, which I felt was pretty high. Surprisingly, I got invited to speak even after that. The really odd thing is that I was told by someone that I was on the speaker list on the site before I was even confirmed to speak. This happened with someone else I know too. It was all cool, but they should be careful about stuff like that.

As for the conference itself, I was pleasantly surprised, as it seemed better than I expected it might be. I heard it was sold out, which is a good thing. There were good crowds, lots of free food and beer (I’d still rather see the price go down, and have people buy their own food and beer though), and the bowling party at Kings Lanes was really fun.

I actually didn’t attend that much of the conference or other parties, as I was working most of the days and had to go home to the family at night. But I did attend the whole last day, the day of my presentation. Things looked good. My presentation was full and went over well. I was ready to go out afterwards, but there didn’t seem to be one big party. Just a few people going out for dinner here and there, so I went home.

On to MAX.

Shortly after finishing my Flash Forward presentation, and thinking I could relax, I realized I had about 10 days til my presentation at MAX, and hadn’t started preparing anything for that. So nose back into Keynote.

Arrived in Chicago, made it to the hotel, checked in and headed over to the registration area in the convention building, which is attached to the hotel. It was a ten minute walk, all in the same building. This place was huge. Picture a place large enough to hold ten Flash Forwards or FiTCs, simultaneously. Or, to give another idea of the size, the AIR bus was in the convention building. In fact they made a whole AIR park for it, with fake grass, picnic tables, a big projection TV, and the Adobe MAX store. And all this occupied a corner which you could easily overlook unless you walked right up on it.

It’s probably the first time I’ve seen 4300 people eating breakfast together. All meals were provided, and there were pretty much open wine and beer bars available any time after 5 pm. I got refused entrance to the speaker dinner because I didn’t RSVP, so a bunch of us went out to some Portuguese meat fest. Other than that first day, and the last evening, I barely left the convention building / hotel.

The party was outrageous. 80’s themed. Retro video game booths, giant rubics cube, operation, other 80’s paraphernalia, Prince videos, break dancers, bmx bike and skateboarders, remote control race cars, interactive exhibits, tons of food and beer and wine, a live band, “Lounge Against the Machine”, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting.

I saw some good presentations, most notably the Flash 9 player internals, presented by a couple of the Flash player engineers. Nice deep dive into what makes it tick. The keynotes were ok. You saw the exciting stuff. The rest was the usual Adobe keynote stuff. Actually, I found them a bit long and somewhat tedious. They tried to cover everything in depth, but there was just too much, and for the 10-15 minutes of stuff that I was excited about, there was 30-45 minutes of stuff I could care less about.

If there is one criticism of MAX, it is that it was just too big. 4300 people. I could walk around for 5-10 minutes without seeing a familiar face. And with up to 20 tracks at any given time, it was nearly impossible to figure out what to go to. And despite the huge numbers of people, it seemed like some presentations that would normally be packed had just a few dozen people in them. There was also a pretty obvious division between the enterprise / back end / cold fusion guys, and the Flash / Flex crowd, with the Photoshop / Illustrator / video crew barely represented at all. At least that’s how it seemed to me. It was definitely developer-heavy. I think it might be a good idea to split up MAX into a couple different conferences, at least, aimed at some of the different audiences that are now a part of the Adobe family.

Overall though, a great time. I was exhausted when I got home, and promptly got sick. All better now and trying to get in shape for Flash on the Beach, which this has all been a lead up to!

Also, I promised that I’d have my presentation files up for both of these conferences. Finally got around to it. Here you go:

http://www.bit-101.com/presentations/