360Flex Day 2

No breakfast this morning. I woke up too late, had to iron and shower, no time for grub...

After making the walk over to eBay, I was able to see Jeffry Houser do his session on making custom components. This was kind of a geek experience for me, because I have listened to his podcast for almost a year now, it's my 2nd favorite podcast behind This American Life. After a few failed attempts for Jeffry to throw chocolate kisses into the crowd, the session started and I learned alot. It reminded me of the same style he does his 15 minutes with flex screencasts.

Next was Promoting your Flex and AIR apps. I can't even begin to explain the wealth of information that this seminar was to me. I learned so much in that hour, it was amazing. So many things that will help me become a better flex/air developer. This seminar was supposed to be given by Mike Potter, but he was not able to make it. Puneet Goel was an awesome fill-in and he even emailed me the slides right after class which I have to think him greatly for.

Lunch was good, Tortilla's, as Jacob stated "it's hard to mess up mexican".

Then we got an announcement that deGrafa would be doing an impromptu session during lunch. This caught my interest, and I went in without any expectations. I came out immediately wanting to download and play with deGrafa. It is THAT amazing. Check out their samples they are awesome!

Next was Neil Webb and Cairngorm for Beginners. Neil really had some awesome analogies for explaining how the MVC structure worked inside of Cairngorm. The more I think about it, the more I feel that I would better not using any frameworks while I'm still trying to master Flex.

After that we went over to Advanced AIR & SQLite Optimization. This really taught me alot of generic SQL tactics that I could use in my current MySQL usage to improve performance.

Lastly was Data Visualization. This was too much code, too late in the day. We left halfway through from fuzzy brain syndrome.

We started talking today about starting our own Flex User Group in the Maryland area. I really think it's a great idea, and want to explore it further.