The 360|Stack conference was held in Denver from August 4-7, 2013. Attendance was lower than last year, leaving many of wondering why. Was it that the conference was in the summer instead of spring? Was the name change a factor?
360|Stack intended to remain the primary (only) Flex conference in the world. And it did seem like the majority of attendees were current or former Flex users. The schedule of talks included more non-Flex content than past years, but that's on purpose: some folks are migrating away from Flex. But I chatted with many attendees who are not immediately migrating. These folks seem to have significant Flex-based applications, and they are definitely considering how to migrate their apps going forward, but many feel like they have another year or two before they have to start migrating, and all were encouraged to see that FlexJS is a potential option. I think my presentations went ok. There wasn't shouts of joy at seeing MXML and AS run in the browser without Flash, but the feedback was positive and there nothing was brought up to make me want to make significant changes in the direction we're headed in, so it is time to start preparing for a 0.1 release. I didn't attend too many other sessions because I was prepping slides and I did have some extensive sit-downs with a few Flex customers. I got one attendee up and running on FlexJS which took a bit longer than expected. We need to make it easier to get it going. But Michael Labriola and Michelle Yaiser never fail to give good inspiring talks. My biggest takeaway, though, was that folks are not able to keep up with what is going on with Apache Flex. Even many of our fellow committers and PMC members were essentially unaware that FlexJS had a prototype to play with. The complaint I heard over and over again is that there is just too much traffic on the dev mailing list and folks are too busy to keep up with it. We are using [] tags to make it easier to filter, but that means folks still have to take the time to set up a filter. We need a better way of communicating important things besides releases in a lower-traffic way. Maybe we should blog/tweet certain things slightly more often, or maybe we should have our own announce@ list. Other ideas welcome. -Alex
