MAX 2007 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
I returned from MAX 2007 late Wednesday night, and it took me a few days to recover. I was physically, mentally and even a little emotionally exhausted from the experience. I have finally posted posts on my "Promoting ColdFusion..." BOF, but I thought I'd better do my review of the conference in the classic Good, Bad and Ugly format before the work week got started, and I got busy in catch-up mode at the office.
The Good
Would I recommend MAX? YES... absolutely. Even with the Bad and the Ugly, I'd still give the conference as a whole an A. Quite honestly, you expect problems when you go to one this big, and the problems I experienced were relatively minor. The conference, as a whole, was VERY well organized. If you are a developer using Adobe products, you really should try to get to one of these.
The Good
- Size - The size of the conference exceeded my expectations. It was the biggest MAX conference ever, and it felt that way. Never have I seen so many people in one place as excited about Adobe products as I am.
- The Keynotes - The announcement of the acquisition of Buzzword (with a demo) and the demonstrations of Thermo and Cocomo blew me away.
- Flex - It's taken me almost four years, but I have finally drank the Flex Kool-Aid. I was and have been involved in Flex from the beginning, but I never got to do much with the betas, and I never saw the full potential of Flex until now. I spent a great deal of my time at MAX learning Flex and more about how to use Flex. I am especially excited of the new applications I can build with ColdFusion and Flex. It's a very good time to be both a Flex and a ColdFusion developer.
- AIR - I spent a lot of time learning more about AIR, too. I see the potential with AIR, and plan to start working on some proof of concept applications.
- Sneak Peeks - As always, the Sneak Peeks didn't disappoint. That was even more true this time. The Flash C/C++ stuff was amazing, and the image manipulation stuff is also cool (although I had seen that already).
- The Pavilion - Unlike past MAX conferences I attended, they kept the developer pavillion open the entire three days (although it should have been open ALL day). I hung out in the community lounge in between sessions, and it was great as always. Thanks to Ed, Christine, Jonathan and the rest of the Developer Relations team for doing a fantastic job with the lounge. Putting the desserts near the lounge was also a good idea.
- The Networking/Camaraderie - This is the best reason to go to MAX, and it didn't disappoint this time. There are a lot of people you only get to see at conferences, and it was good to see many of those people again at MAX.
- The BOFs - OK, I am a little biased. I hosted two Birds of a Feather, but they were a great thing. That said, I have a major gripe which I'll list below.
- The Booze - OK, I can appreciate that this is not for everyone, but there was an abundant supply of alcohol at several times during the conference, and it was paid for. That was welcomed. I promise that I didn't over endulge, too much...
- The Food - There was a lot of food, and it was possible for me to only buy food twice during the conference, yet still eat plenty.
- Distances and the Venue - The size of MAX, along with the venue, came with a cost. The conference was strewn across a large area, and there were no moving sidewalks, elevators or carts to move people from one side of the conference to the other. I often had to go from one end of the conference to the other between sessions, which involved three escalators, and walking long distances, while fighting through the crowds, acquaintances, and the problems of lugging your stuff back and forth. Most of the time, you couldn't make it in fifteen minutes, and there were times when I changed my schedule around just so I didn't have to deal with it. I think, if the facility is as large and there are as many people at the next MAX, I'd recommend a 20 minute break between sessions, or carts to bring people from one place to another faster than walking to cut down on the times to get from one end of the conference to the other.
- The Event - Whenever I go to MAX, I look forward to getting to see some attraction in the host city during the event. That didn't happen this time. I found the things they had were lame, and I wasn't interested in any of them. Some of the food was decent, while other food wasn't or there wasn't enough available of it. What's more - they charged $100 for guests. I know one CFer who didn't bother to attend because it meant an extra $100 for his wife. And you know what? He was right. It wasn't worth $100. I heard they were trying to get into Soldier Field, which would have been cool, but doing an event at McCormick was a letdown.
- Conference Schedule - I have two old friends that live in Chicago, and it's been nearly four years since I've seen them, and I was REALLY looking forward to seeing them again while I was in Chicago. My schedule, which was probably busier than your typical attendee (with the community leader dinner on Sunday night and the BOFs on Monday night (I hosted two of them) left me with no downtime and I didn't get to see them at all. If I had known Tuesday's event was going to be as lame as it was, I would have tried to see them then. Instead, I left Chicago without seeing them, and I am sure they were pretty disappointed. I know I was. If I had been able to stay past Wednesday, I may have felt differently.
- Busing between hotels - Buses ran anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, which made going back and forth from the hotel and the conference difficult at best. It took nearly an hour on Wednesday morning to get to the conference. I got there in time to make my Flex Camp session, but not in time for breakfast. Hotels that were closer would have been a better alternative.
- The Food - Wait - food was in the Good. What gives? Well, some of it wasn't the greatest. Actually, not all of the food was bad. Some of it was VERY good. I particularly loved the Shrimp Alfredo and the Jalapeno and cheese pretzels. However, food was inconsistent, some of it was terrible and the snacks were almost always high carb. I would have appreciated cheese and other low-carb offerings, particularly during snack times. Worst of all, the food and drink was almost always taken away too early. Thirty minutes was not enough time for food breaks. You should have been able to get something whenever you wanted it. If you were in a hands-on session, you would miss the food break altogether. Food was taken away FAR too early during the event. When the food left, most of the crowd left, myself included.
- AIR Park - That sucked. It should have been combined with the pavilion. I spent almost no time there, and Ted's hype that there would be grass in AIR Park... well, it was astroturf. Big deal. There didn't seem to be anything good going on there.
- Promoting the BOFs - The MAX team did a very poor job at promoting the Birds of a Feather sessions. The only thing that was official was on our chairs at the keynote, but there was nothing beyond that, and the registration and information desks didn't have anything on them until *I* asked for them. After I inquired, they re-printed them and had copies... but if you missed it on the back of page 4, you probably didn't know about the BOFs. This was a gross oversight, and something I hope will not be repeated again.
- Wireless and wired internet access - That's the only way I can say it - UGGGLLLYYY. You usually couldn't get a signal, and if you could, the connection speeds were abysmal. That was why I didn't blog, and had a really hard time dealing with work, as I couldn't function within the VPN if I was able to get connected. I also wasn't impressed that the internet access wasn't free at the hotels. I understand three star+ hotels usually charge you, but it would have been nice if it had been given away for a technology conference like MAX.
- The L Trains (Subway) - Getting to the conference from O'Hare was a pain. Everyone told us that it was easiest to get to the conference center from O'Hare using the train, but there was construction on the Blue Line, and you couldn't get to the Red Line from the Blue Line. We gave up and got a cab from the Clark and Lake station. It took us two hours to get to the conference from O'Hare, and it would have been a lot longer had we not given up on the trains. More than that, the trains were filled with homeless people. When it was time to get back to the airport, we decided to take a cab instead, and ran into rush hour traffic. We got there with time to spare, even with rush hour traffic (thanks to our cab driver, who was obviously experienced working Chicago rush hour traffic), but not without some white knuckles. Other than providing shuttles to the airport, I don't know what Adobe could have done to prevent this, but it was a pain anyway.
Would I recommend MAX? YES... absolutely. Even with the Bad and the Ugly, I'd still give the conference as a whole an A. Quite honestly, you expect problems when you go to one this big, and the problems I experienced were relatively minor. The conference, as a whole, was VERY well organized. If you are a developer using Adobe products, you really should try to get to one of these.
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The Palmer House forced me to stay in a room with no bathroom the first night, (tried to) charged my credit card double the amount, soiled my stuff that was in my closet (because they /had/ to install a new safe?),
and burnt out my car's transmission.
The busses were OK, but needed to run more often in the morning and when we wanted to go back. I missed breakfast on Tuesday and Wednesday because there were too many people waiting at 8:15am, so when the
8:30 bus came, only half could fit. The next bus came at 9:15am, and got us there 10 minutes late for our next session. There should have been busses lined up to take us there first thing in the morning.
Apart from Wednesday morning, I didn't have too many problems with wifi access but I gather I was one of the lucky ones. This always seems to be a problem at tech conferences and many of the issues this time were caused by unexpected problems with the conference center's DNS server so I heard.
I chose not to attend the "special event" because it would have cost $100 for my wife - and we would both have been absolutely incensed if we'd spent $100 on what we subsequently heard the event was like! I'm very glad I chose not to attend (we had a lovely, quiet dinner-for-two in the hotel restaurant).
As for shuttles to/from McCormack Place, I was in the speaker hotel which was right next door. The downside - and in my opinion it was a huge downside - was that there was very little opportunity for networking after hours because you only had access to the speakers and not the much larger pool of attendees.
Next year in San Francisco should be much better. The entire city is walkable so everyone will be within a small area with plenty of easily accessible hotels, bars and restaurants. I suspect people will still complain about the distance between sessions tho' - that's just a reality of having so many sessions at the same time: they are going to be spread out across the entire complex - although Moscone Center is not as sprawling as McCormack Place so it may be noticeably easier on the hoof...
I wasn't there, but went to Max Vegas last year. The venue and food there was really good, you could easily walk between events and and walk back to your hotel room as it was all in the one building.
I think also that part of the reason I went was that it was in Vegas, and there are lots of things to do and see, Chicago held no real apeal to me.
Perahaps they should consider going back to the Venetian?
@Nick, yeah, I'll probably never stay at the Palmer House again, either. I didn't have as bad of an experience as you did, but it wasn't all that great. I wish our buddy, Rick, had been able to come.
The distances between things at the venue didn't bother me, walking is a good thing, eh?
The food was well, it was conference food. Hit or miss on interesting stuffs. Heck, feeding 400+ people at once is a challenge. So many places to eat around Chicago though if you need to. One major gripe I had with the food: WHERE WAS THE FRUIT! At all 4 previous MAX events (or DevCon as it was called) fruit was always available . Have to have some fruit to offset all that deep-fried stuff and ahem, drinking.
The 5-7 'happy hour' was the best as usual, I really like these. Wind down, mingle, meet, and what was that other thing...oh drink! Really big gripe on it this year though: Live band good. VERY LOUD live band bad.
The Event was ok. A few good creative ideas there with the flash back. That quartet rocked with some crazy renditions. Pet rock, Operation, break dancing, total flash back. But the
Seguey piece was a bit too modern. Food wise, chicken wings and no moist towelettes? That's trouble!
All in all, 'twas a great MAX.
Flex on...
DK
http://www.jobster.com/people/palm-tree-lamp