My First Flex conference
The title is a bit deceptive but to clarify I did go to a Flex conference recently not as a speaker fortunately. It was the first and most probably the last time I have ever been to a conference unless ofcourse I am in a serious need of free licenses to expensive software (like Adobe’s products) or free training sessions and even that is not guaranteed. I cannot really blame my luck though because towards the end I did win a “Flash on the beach†(which is another conference in Bristol…does not sound like a conference name though) bag.
Apart from the bag winning moment, the entire conference was quite unexciting and on top of that several speakers were horrendously unprepared. It was running late and the organiser was just rushing the speakers to go through their slides. If publishers of ‘Sams Series’ would have graced the occasion they would have appointed some of them for their new book with the title – “Teach yourself Flex and ColdFusion in 15 minâ€. The speaker talking about Flex and Java took less than 10 minutes to explain his convoluted system without breaking sweat. I am not blaming the speakers but what is the point of holding these events when the outcome is a complete zilch.
Several people in the audience were taking notes…I don’t know why. What can you possibly absorb in a 15 minute session? Hardly anyone there knew about Scrum or Git which is astounding as you would expect these people to atleast acquaint themselves with the current technologies.
Conferences are not that bad…I am sure freelancers would reap benefits from such events by marketing themselves. In addition there were few things I did learn like the existence of the following:
To summarise, conferences are a futile affair unless you are looking for a job as there are companies there to hire or you are a freelancer and are looking to extend your network to get some work.