Some thoughts on MAX2008
Max2008 in Milan is over for me now, I arrived home at just after 2am in the morning after spending only 8 hours on the bus this time, and a few things went through my mind on the drive home.
Organization
I have the feeling that this Max was better organized, Blue Projects did both MAX's but this years just seemed better. I do have a couple of critics though.Developers drink beer!
Here is a simple calculation you can make that will most likely always work. For each event where beer will be served take the expected number of attendees and multiply that number by the number of hours for the event multiplied by 2.
So for 1400 attendees and a 3 hour event you should have about 8400 beer on hand.
And if 1200 men are drinking a minimum of 2 beer per hour then a single Toilet is just not going to do the trick. This is the first time since college that I used the ladies.
Labs
The labs are great to have, but none of them are advanced courses. I spoke with a few different people not only developers and they all said that the labs were set up more for a general audience.Some of the lab exercises were exactly the same for different labs. OK both labs had to do with LCDS but one was Flex and the other was ColdFusion but we ended up doing the same exercises for both labs. Which also happened to be the same as last year too (the chat application, grid editing).
Sneak Peaks and Keynote
In the days before blogs it probably wouldn't have mattered that all the same sneak peaks and such were delivered to three different audiences because they probably weren't pre-informed. Now days I can get spoiler information about 15 seconds after it's out of a speakers mouth by way of "live blogging".It would make it a lot more exciting for us if information was released in phases some info at Max NA, some at Max EU and some at MAX Japan. This way all event attendees will have a something revealed to them that is a first and the magic of attending a MAX isn't reserved exclusively for the USA.
Final Thoughts
I still think MAX is a worthwhile event to attend and will certainly try to convince my boss of it's worth and try to expand who from us gets attend. It's a great opportunity to meet like minded individuals, party with Adobe staff, meet Evangelists, and be blown away by some of the incredibly brilliant minded people that attend.
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I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you at MAX Milan... actually, I don't know what you look like so even though I'm sure I probably saw you, I didn't say hi.
I agree with all your thoughts here, and got a good laugh from your description of lack of toilets for the Tuesday night party!
Regarding the labs, I also agree there was too much repetition even though I haven't been to a MAX before. And it's also true that most of the labs were too "basic" for me. However, I will admit that "Real-time ColdFusion with LiveCycle DataServices ES", by Ryan Stewart, was a bit challenging to me... though, my excuse is that I had to play catchup since I was 7 minutes late and was wayyyy in the back of the room. Did you do that Lab, too?
btw - I looked at your resume and noticed you've lived in Boston, Canada, and now Germany? I just moved to The Hague, Netherlands 2 months ago, and would love to hear your thoughts on being a developer *and* and expat... aqlong [[at]] gmail [[dot]] com