The Flashoo Flash Builder and Flex 4 Event – Recap

Community

Zohar Babin in 26 Apr 2010

It’s an exciting time indeed for Flash Platform developers in Israel. As the market grow and we see the demand for Flash & Flex Developers increasing quickly.

The Flashoo Community (User Group) is a forum of the leading Flash and Flex Developers in Israel, entrepreneurs and team leaders utilizing the Flash Platform. Flashoo holds regular events and meetups to connect the Flash developers in Israel, provide free training, share ideas and solutions and create opportunities – spreading the Flash love around.

The Beer, Fun, Flex 4 & Flash Builder event featured two great speakers – Mihai Corlan, an Adobe Flash Platform evangelist and Lior Bruder, an Israeli Flex trainer. The event was sponsored by InterBit, an Israeli Open Source technologies training institute and broadcasted live using Kaltura. As the Flashoo tradition, the event was during the evening hours, to reach the time when people are more free from the day’s tasks and on Thursday to really make it a good opportunity for people to connect.

The event program – was very straight forward, we got around (all 250 attendees) to drink beer and munch some snacks. Then the sessions start, first Mihai Corlan, showcasing the new tools and features of the Flash Builder and Flex 4 framework. The most important part of Mihai’s talk was the Q&A – You could really see the crowd excited about having an official Adobe employee to answer questions regarding the development & future of the platform. A small break and the second up was Lior Bruder, discussing developing Flex 4 applications. With the traditional Flashoo raffle, we closed the event and a bunch of us continued with the speakers to the near by pub, drinking some beer and discussion nerdy developer matters.

Organizing events is an Amazing experience – First, thanks to the great team of Flashoo, that made most of the job organizing the event, spreading the word and making sure everything goes smooth. Secondly, for the great opportunity of meeting cool people at the event, hearing about new and exciting endeavors and mostly for the chance to get on that stage, and behold this great number of people sharing the same love for technology.

We learned a lot! We got both positive feedback and things to improve for next time like making the break longer with more refreshments. This event also triggered some of the old friends of flashoo to get back in being involved, offering help in future meetings and events and visiting the forums, helping other Flashers.

At the event we also announced the new Articles section in Flashoo. An archive of interesting and effective articles that the community deal with on a daily basis as well as more “exotic” topics like 3D, Mobile, Design tips and more. The articles are written by the community members and will have a tagging and voting system that will allow us to select a leading writer every month – who will be rewarded with cool prizes. Also, every 6 months, a leading writer will be selected and be rewarded with an expensive prize! -So don’t forget to add your articles to the section, it can be on any Flash related topic that will interest you and can also be something published on your blog.

Second announcement was the new Adobe Flashoo page, a while ago Adobe introduced a new website for their groups (AUGs) world-wide. Since Flashoo content is in Hebrew and we already have Flashoo site running since 2002 – we’ve decided to maintain both places. Using the Adobe page to increase visibility of the community and calling for new members to join. Check it out.

A huge thank you goes to our great event sponsors –