FITC San Francisco 2010

This week I was able to attend FITC San Francisco.  I haven’t been to a conference in a few years and Pucknell and his crew didn’t disappoint at all.  The venue was the perfect size to keep all the sessions close by so there wasn’t much walking between sessions.  Free lunch every day that was actually pretty decent.  There was a great line up of speakers full of inspiration and ideas on how to make coding fun again.  I was also able to catch up with some guys I haven’t seen in a few years.

Favorites:

@jaredrawk did an amazing inspirational session on thinking outside of the box.  The guy is a mad scientist and you can tell he just really loves what he does. He was exciting on stage and showed off some really cool experiments that he has done with speakers, corn starch, trash cans, smoke machines, flame tables and more.

Rob Bateman (away3d.com) gave a great introduction to Away 3d.  I feel kind of bad I hadn’t look into it more sooner.  I have done so much with papervision it just seemed like the natural choice every time.  The pv3d team seems to be focused on doing more with unity 3d these days and I think Away 3d has kept things going and really raised the bar.

Rober Hodgin (flight404.com) did an inspirational session on what he has been doing with other things like processing and cinder.  He creates some pretty amazing things.  I’d love to see a guy like him show off a bit more code, but in general it was really cool stuff and inspiring to jump back into the generative art stuff.

Craig Swann gave a great presentation about doing more with flash than just work.  He has definitely inspired me to get back into playing with phidgets and do more with flash outside of the standard platforms we use every day.

The parties were awesome, except the music was unbearably loud both nights and it made talking very difficult.  Tycho put on a great show, but would have loved to have the volume just a little lower.

There were a number of other great presentations showing off cool stuff like unity 3d, moock’s union platform, multi user tricks, dispelling myths that flash is dead and son.  4 tracks and the Influxis voodoo lounge gave plenty of time for some great sessions at FITC.

There are a couple of things that I thought were a bit of a bummer though.  Some sessions don’t match their descriptions very well.  Some sessions that sound like they will be tech talks are nothing more than a basic introduction to a topic that everyone is fully aware of.  For instance, I didn’t think social media needed to be explained to the group at FITC, seeing more code in that session would have been fun.  I also feel like there are quite a few sessions where people just kind of show off what they can do, but not really how to do it.  Most of those things shown off are usually already on blogs somewhere and it can be fairly repetitive when just seeing thing at a conference.  It would be cool to have something to walk away with more than “wow that guy does cool stuff”.

I am looking forward to making FITC a regular thing every year and I hope they make it back to san francisco.