RIAPalooza Recap

Warning: I am keying this in LATE on Tuesday/early on Wednesday while trying to get to sleep and without my written notes nearby, so I will need to ninja edit this to add links and last names/details soon. My apologies to all who are not mentioned yet or whose last names are omitted/misspelled-I will update this later today when I am not laying in bed typing.

First off, kudos to the organizers! I hope that this is not the last time an event like this is held (Madison, WI is rumoured as a future location-now __that__ could be fun!!). The location had plenty of comfy chairs and decent sightlines for the overhead projector, which are both VERY important for tech conferences.

I missed a good deal of Friday night’s activities due to work and traffic. By the time I found parking and the venue, I was able to get a few bites of pizza while networking after hearing part of a panel discussion about Ruby on Rails and the business side of RIA’s.

I opted to crash at a Doubletree in Arlington Heights (gotta love Hilton HHonors) instead of driving to Rockford, only to drive back into the city after a few hours (literally) of sleep. Although the hotel had a really comfy bed and clean room, my morning wake-up calls (plural) came 15 minutes late (arrrrrgh!!!). Also, Wolfgang Puck makes an awful cup of coffee-the room had a Wolfgang Puck coffee maker with coffee pods, which should be renamed “tea pods” due to the weakness of the coffee; after taking the “coffee,” dumping it back into the machine, and rerunning it through the “coffee pod” I was finally able to get something resembling coffee. Thank goodness for the organizers having coffee at the event!

The first session was almost the same as what I’ve been doing professionally since February. Corrina Barber and Tim used Expression Studio and Visual Studio 2008 in a “work” environment. Corrina’s part seemed to go a bit slow, but only because she was doing a lot of “little” things instead of showing the bigger picture as I was expecting to instead see (in her defense, she thought that the presentation was a 2 hour time block and not the one hour they were given. Also in her defense, her approach-and workflow- was spot on to what I’ve been doing). She mentioned that they were open to feedback, so I asked if I could take about 15 minutes of her time (which turned into a few hours, which caused me to miss the next two sessions. I saw the “official” Twitter from the conference state that she was “holding court” in the networking room… yikes!). Corrina gets an extra “Thank You” from me for the code and for hearing me out-I had a bunch of feedback to give (and would have a LOT more hair today if it were not for Expression Blend).

Zach Stephek slipped over and mentioned to us that it was about to be lunchtime and that there would be another panel discussion over lunch, so the speakers needed to grab food to actually get a chance to eat. I caught the very end of the presentation (basically the contact slide was showing on their PowerPoint). A guy I met the evening before (Joe Wanka) had brought in a neat Abelton Live project to show me that had a sort of randomness to the musical phrasing that I did not know was possible to do in Abelton. I will need to reinstall my copy of Live to try this idea “on for size” in the next few days; he had a few great ideas regarding data visualization that he showed to me as well (I LOVE Sparklines!).

I won a copy of “Ajax Hacks” because I knew the names of three sponsors. I did not have this book yet and will have to give it more attention. I missed the veggie sandwiches (as did Larry Clarkin, a fellow veggie to whom I still owe a beer), so I got to munch on potato chips for lunch. I heard part of Anthony’s presentation re: Blend and did not realize that he and I wear similar hats and have similar work histories.

I was also exposed to the idea of Agile coding and development-an idea with which I am intrigued-in one (or maybe two??) presentation(s). I like the idea of write once, run everywhere, and reuse of code/items/workflow when and as necessary and will be researching this as time permits. I also got to see workflow ideas from a company doing a project for the country of Quatar (which also hit close-to-home for me) and an interesting blog creation tool whose complete use I have yet to completely comprehend-I am a bit confused as to why the coding was being done in Flexbuilder when I was under the impression that all of the needed information had been previously entered in the tool and exported (and downloaded as a zipfile). I did like the styling of his PowerPoint slide set though. Actually, since this conference was supposed to be a “PowerPoint-free Zone,” I suspect that his presentation (and the others’) did not use PowerPoint?

The crowd makeup seemed to be a lot of web designers and a few coders. The speakers I got to see seemed to be heavily-biased towards using Expression Blend. Towards the end, the coders seemed to outnumber the web designers. I even saw a few non-web’ish designers in the mix. There were also a LOT of Macintoshes present (more than I’d expect to see at such an event), even by some of those employed by Microsoft.
There was surprisingly also a lot of MS Vista being used on people’s laptops (more than I’ve _ever_ seen being used, except in a store selling computers).

Overall, RIAPalooza was a great experience; running a conference is a lot of work and the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and venue were all wonderful! If you were not there, then you missed out on a great time! (and it was also FREE!)