360Flex we ran into Ben Stucki at the video store

Tom and I decided to rent some movies to take a break from planning our next event, so we headed to the nearest Blockbuster video, and right there in the classic horror section was Ben Stucki, speaker at 360|Flex San Jose.

"hey dude, how ya doin?" I ask as we walk over to him. He puts down a copy of 'The Toxic Avenger' and says, "Hey guys, I'm good, you?"

"Just taking a break. 360|Flex San Jose is only about 10 days away, who do you hope comes to your session?" Tom asks, picking up a copy of Event Horizon.

As Stucki answers, I smack the box out of Tom's hand wagging a finger at him, "No"

"Everybody should come. If you see somebody outside the conference rooms during my session, tell them to run because they're missing out!"

I pick up a copy of RoboCop, obviously in the wrong section, but still a damn good flick, "I'll buy that for a dollar! So Ben why should they come to your session?"

He walks over to the classic drama section, picking up a misplaced 'Care Bares Movie' between two fingers, "Ick. To learn how to build frameworks. Not just how to use existing frameworks or an overview of age-old patterns, but how to solve specific problems or add functionality to Flex in a clean and reusable way."

"that's cool, that's a huge plus. I may have to sneak away to sit in on that one." Tom says, walking around the movie rack in the childrens section, Stucki hands him the offending Care Bare movie and moves on toward the Sci Fi section.

Stucki picks up Batman (the 1966 version), tucks it under one arm, moving on, "I really hope that people walk away from my session with a new approach to Flex development. The session will be a little like philosophy class for developers, but I'm also trying to take all those lofty architectural ideas and bring them down to some real world code examples. When you manage to decouple code from the application and simplify it enough to be idealistic and functional at the same time, things start working the right way almost by accident."

Tom picks up a copy of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a classic any day, and asks Stucki what two sessions he wants to see most in San Jose.

Stucki picks up a copy of Blue Thunder, and walks with us towards the freakishly long line, hello it's a Thursday, why are you people renting! "I'm definitely going to be at Ryan Campbell's session on PlexiGlass. I know he's working on some really awesome examples, and Plexiglass makes it stupid easy to do 3D in Flex. I'm also looking forward to Laura Arguello's presentation on Mate."

We pay for our movies, Stucki pays for his, and as we head for the door, Tom asks, "what should we tell the fence sitters? we're about 2 weeks out and people are surely still debating whether they want to attend?"

Stucki looks at us, and with a straight face say, "Get off the fence. Seriously, this is where the entire Flex community hangs out. If you're a Flex developer and your not there, you're missing out." He smiles, "That's what I'd tell 'em at least"

Ben Stucki would know, he's been to every single 360|Flex in the US. Times almost out, there is no waiting list, register now!

Make sure to check out the free Sunday training for registered attendees.