My first 360|Flex experience began Monday morning with Mike Labriola (@mlabriola, slides) stalking back and forth in front of a standing room only crowd. Shirt un-tucked, one hand thrust into a pocket he held a goblet of water in the other from which he alternately took sips and gestured to his listeners. Delivering his best Sean Astin, Mike transformed the room into his private cigar study. We were all in audience to savor his cognac and digest the divine merits of unit testing Flex applications.

“Welcome to 360|Flex,” I thought. The session was fantastic and Mike was entertaining all the way through the final “ok, get out of here” as he waved his empty goblet and turned his back.

Bookend that session with my final session Wednesday afternoon on Design Patterns delivered by Yakov Fain (@yfain). I whispered to @dmatchack sitting in front of me, “I hope we finally talk about something over than MVC”. He said, “no kidding” and chuckled.

What we received in the next 1 hr and 20 minutes was a much more than that.

Though likely not the whole story on Yakov, I left with the distinct impression that Yakov HATES Cairngorm and PureMVC (mate didn’t garner a sneer) in favor of implementing good design patterns in a more appropriate manner. Yakov gave away a book to an attendee, “though I’m not really satisfied with that answer”. Halfway through the session we were treated to a gratuitous (though clean) slide of Angelina Jolie. The half filled room erupted in laughter and applause.

I attended as many non-developer related sessions as were of interest to me. This strategy yielded my favorite sessions from the conference:

Joe Johnston (@merhl)
FLEXperience - Putting the Flex in UX
http://www.slideshare.net/merhl/flexperience

Francisco Inchauste (@iamfinch)
RIA Mojo - Making Your Flex Application Stand Out with a Great UX
http://www.davidortinau.com/presos/RIA_Mojo.pdf

Joe Olsen (@joeolsen, @phenomblue)
Creativity is the Fuel, Process is the Engine: Building a Scalable Interactive Production Environment

All said, it was a great 3 days of meeting or at least experiencing great people (@jprevel, @randytroppmann, @lordb8r, @kremdela, @visualrinse, http://coenraets.org/), learning a new tip here and there, and overall being reminded why I do what I do building interactive experiences.

Thanks to @lordbron and @jwilker and everyone else that made this a great conference.