Mario Talavera Writes

Has just posted their schedule for their Orlando stop.

I was fortunate enough to have gone to this conference a few years ago. Always the skeptic, I was surprised by the sessions I attended and the wonderful speakers they had lined up for the event. Some, like Bruce Tate, made a big difference in my view of our craft.

Anyways, the conference seems to have grown quite a bit and prices seem reasonable. Maybe this is the one conference I go to this year…

The next 360|Flex Conference, which will be held on Ebay’s Campus (like the first one) has just had its

The schedule for the upcoming 360|Flex Conference has just been posted.  It looks promising.

FYI – they even have included the free Sunday event.  Awesome!  In my opinion, this is still one of the best conferences around.  Looking at the schedule, seems like the hardest part would be to pick between sessions scheduled at the same time.

Yikes! – No sessions repeat.  This conference needs a few more days just for this; too much info!

360|Flex, the best conference ever, is going to be held in San Jose, California this upcoming August. It will be held in the same place as before, Ebay Campus.

If I only go to one conference this year; this will be it. I am absolutely saving my pennies. If you’re interested in what flex can do; I highly recommend this conference.

Another reason why these are the best conferences ever!  The guys at 360 Conferences, having met their financial needs for their Europe event have just slashed the price (9 days before the show).  For more info, go to the 360|Flex Europe Site.

Amazing, not only are they lowering the price, they are both refunding same amount to all registered AND making the first day of conference FREE for anyone to attend.

Way to go guys!

I was reading up on my friend Adam’s blog and noticed that Barcamp Orlando is coming up. This is the second year for Orlando that I know off and many people talked about event for a bit afterwards. I wussed out of event and, originally thought, that I would not be able to make this one either. Luckily, my lovely wife says beginning of April is safe (we are expecting our second child beginning of May.
This puts a nice twist on events; I have no excuse now. Hopefully, I am going to be able to persuade perhaps a colleage or two to make it. So far I expect a few persons I know to go…

Here’s a link for more information. I am both intrigued and interested in event.

Saturday morning got off to a good start with a talk on Netbeans from the guys at Sun. Being an Eclipse user for most of my work, it was refreshing to see how polished a product NetBeans is.

They demoed a lot of features for the rails community and contrasted them against TextMate which I believe sets the standard. I checked out NetBeans at home later and will definitely do some of the tutorials they have online.

In my opinion, the most impressive talk of the second day was on JRuby. JRuby answers most of the concerns management has at my work of using rails for any significant development. I hope it really helsp make the case for both the language and the framework.

Another good talk was given by Charles Brian Quinn of Big Nerd Ranch fame.

During the past few weeks at work, we’ve been debating training options for our development team and I have repeatedly put Big Nerd Ranch on the list for both Python and Cocoa. While we do not work in neither of these languages, I believe our team can strengthen their skills playing outside our regular playing field. This is something we rarely do and I think hurts us as a team. Its like developing in a vacuum and missing out of most out of our area of expertise. Nothing has come out of this yet thou.

Charles gave an insightful talk mostly from the trainers perspective. His lessons were worth noting for most developers who ever had to teach or train on some skill-set.

The closing keynote was given by Obie Fernandez mostly on developers honing their craft. It was a very encouraging talk and it was well received by the audience. Great job.  It reminded me of the book The Pragmatic Programmer a few times.

Overall, acts was a great conference put by Atlantic Dominion Solutions; I had fun and enjoyed all the talks I went to. I’ll be staying up to date with the rails community in Orlando… They have a very active user group (ORUG) and there is some overlap with our local Adobe group (Adogo).

In the interest of stepping out of my comfort (Coldfusion) zone, I recently attended acts_as_conference, a local (Orlando) Ruby conference.

I showed up semi-sick with a cold, an empty notepad and interested in soaking up the sessions to see how I could apply them to both rails and coldfusion programing. There were even some fellow coldfusion developers providing me with some comfort. Being sick, I did not spend any time with them; I am certain I got more out of seeing them there than they got out of me.

The company I work for was gracious enough to sponsor me even if we do not see any rails development (for now). This conference was a nice contrast to the usual java or coldfusion conference. Overall, it was small, non-commercial and felt more like a huge user-group than a conference event.

I really liked how most of the session’s topics could easily apply to rails as they could to any other programming language.

It was great to see Neal Ford talk about DSL. I had seen him once before at NFJS and he didn’t disappoint. His presentation was full of examples where code evolves thru implementations of DSL. I am sure things are not as simple as he makes them seem. Its a matter of his vast experience in the topic and my lack of.

My work related development could possibly benefit with these practices mostly because we seem to perpetually revise the same tools over and over again.

Another highlight for me was to see Peter Armstrong talk about Rail on Air.

Peter wrote a book on Flex and Rails (Flexible Rails) that I’ve been a fan of since I got it. He first put up his book (as he was writing it) up at lulu.com. Buying the book entitled us to follow along as he wrote it. Peter gracefully provided his readers with google groups for discussion and many other benefits of a small focused community.

Later on, his book got picked up by Manning. I’ve recently received my paper copy (bought as well) and it is wonderful.

This will most definitely be my second book to do this year. He has updated it to Flex 3 and Rails 2. Flex 3 Builder hasn’t come out yet and I rather not have to deal with product expirations for a while… Best focus on that book by itself.

Sadly, I couldn’t stay to the end of his session because of work related circumstances but was able to briefly meet Peter afterwards. I was delighted. He seems to have big plans for this year; I wish him the best and will be sure to keep up to date with his work.

Day two coming soon…

One conference I am missing this year and will regret for a long time is 360|Flex-Atlanta which will take place February 25-27. Having made the one in San Jose last year, I expect this to be one of the best conferences of the year. Last years’ was very developer-centric with no fluff whatsoever.

If you want to go to the best Flex/Actionscript conference and this is the best place to go…

FYI – I just signed up for acts_as_conference to be held in Orlando, Florida February 8th and 9th.

Hoping for a nice change of pace and different perspective on web development.