Waxing Lyrical

Another year of webdu and as usual another success. The highlight of the conference this year I think was the trading card game introduced by Nectarine - people got really into it and it was fun to watch. I'm hoping that next year they'll add attack and defence or something so we can battle for cards :D

I must say I missed the banquet this year - I've always enjoyed the opportunity to sit and eat with other developers and have a good chat, but while it was a little hard to talk at Kingpin it was definitely fun. Very interesting to see who ended up on the karaoke machine toward the end of the night!

It was a different crowd this year - a lot of the familiar faces but I noticed a lot of the people who've been there the last few years were missing. I don't know if it's because they were looking for more advanced content perhaps, but it did somewhat change the atmosphere and camaraderie of the conference. The upside to that was that we seemed to have a much larger number of people from the flash and flex worlds among others, so there was a real cross disciplinary thing going on. Hopefully the same people will keep coming back and get to know each other!

One item I want to make a note of was Mike Labriola's talk on the internal operations occurring in the first few milliseconds of your flex application starting up. Mike is a really nice guy and brilliant while he's at it. He's the kind of monkey who just can't help tearing everything apart, and fortunately he's all too eager to share his hard won knowledge with us lesser life-forms, so if you get the opportunity to go to any talk of his definitely attend - you'll learn more useful things in an hour than you might at a whole flex course.

Thanks yet again to Geoff Bowers and the amazing team at Daemon - we'll see you next year.