Max Europe Summary

I posted a pretty big rant on Thursday about the post event training but it was only one day of the conference, while a particularly annoying day, it didn't ruin the conference experience for me.

The following are my thoughts on the Event:

The City

Barcelona was a really interesting city one that I had not before had an opportunity to visit and was glad that Adobe had the foresight to block out the hotel rooms from the 13 to the 18 of October. This enabled those of us who wanted to get a little sight-seeing in before the conference to arrive a couple of days early.

The Venue

The CCIB center is almost directly on the waterfront, and about 300 meters from the nearest beach bar. All events, outside of the Tuesday night party, were on the same floor, with the community pavilion on the first floor. The provided a cozy intimate environment and ample opportunity to strike up conversations with folks.

The Community Pavilion

I thought the community pavilion was set up quite good with the large blue bean bags for people to chill out on and then further in the back some more bean bags, and comfortable couches and chairs to relax on. They also had 4 catering stations set up so the wait for lunch wasn't too long.

The Food

The food, while good, was really limiting in choice. You had your choice between tapas or tapas for every catered meal. While I eat just about everything, most of the tapas consisted of either fish or meat so if you were a vegitarian you were pretty much screwed. Or left to eat bread, the garnish, or "fruit-kabobs". A salad buffet would have been greatly appreciated.

The General Sessions

The general sessions were really well organized and run with only some minor, and to be expected, technical glitches here and there. Some people I spoke with considered a lot of the general session to be nothing more than Adobe marketing their products. While, with a couple of the presentations I too agree, I in general disagree. To me it had more the feel of "check out the cool shit we are doing" than simply Adobe marketing their new/improved/in-the-pipeline products.

The Regular Sessions

Here I will be a little more critical. There were some exceptional sessions, Christophe Coenraets AIR sessions was probably the best, Daniel Dura's sessions were also well done. But there were also some particularly "below average" sessions which were mainly caused by last minute changes (Those I won't name). In general the sessions spanned the full spectrum from excellent to below average. Thankfully most of the sessions that I sat in on were in the good to excellent range.

Hands-On Training

I only attended one hands on training session (Hands On: Building ColdFusion Powered Flex Applications) and I felt that it was a bit too basic for something billed as intermediate. I received the same feedback from most of the folks I talked to that attended hands on training sessions. But then again the sessions were typically only 1 1/2 hours and you can't cover too much in that amount of time, likewise I guess they wanted to provide for the lowest common denominator.

Overall Opinion and Thoughts

It was the first conference done in Europe and I think Adobe learned a lot about their audience here and hopefully the next MAX will be even better organized and attended.

There is definitely room for improvement with respect securing and confirming the attendance of speakers/trainers and not double booking them.

Overall I think the conference was worth the time and money to attend. The same can't be said for the post event training, at least in my case, perhaps others have different opinion here.

I have uploaded some pictures of Barcelona and MAX up on my flickr account.