I’ve went today to a conference held by Adobe Romania at the Intercontinental Hotel. Of course, I’ll start with the most important aspect of this kind of conferences: the food. The food was decent, better than Microsoft provides at its events but still, an Oracle presentation from a few years ago still remains the unbeaten champion.
Now that that’s covered, I’ll move on to the more technical aspects. It had lots of presentations held by Adobe evangelists, some from the romanian team and two presentations from an adobe senior evangelist – Ben Forta – a really funny dude despite his long beard that might suggest a grumpier person. I’ve liked his presentations a lot, especially the one about Cold Fusion, an Adobe (former Macromedia) product first launched ages ago before technologies like PHP or ASP even existed, but not very popular nowadays. Never the less, it can prove quite a lifesaver sometimes. I also liked presentations held by Mihai Corlan and Mihai Pricope about AIR and Flex. There was a really boring speech from one of their VPs about…well…nothing, but apart from that, I’ve really enjoyed this conference.
I entered in one of their weird contests – the prize being a Flex Professional licence. Apart from which one might expect from a company like Adobe, this contest had nothing to do with programming. It’s like this:
- go to Mihai Corlan and get 5 posters with Flex and AIR APIs
- choose any bar or pub you want
- go to the bartender and convince him to let you hang 2 posters there
Sounds easy, 3 simple steps, but it’s not. Developers are by nature antisocial beings and walking to a bar and convince a bartender to let you hang the Flex API on his wall requires a lot of courage and people skills. Lacking those qualities, I’ve decided to…cheat my way to the licence. Actually it’s not cheating, because they didn’t say that the bartender must be a total stranger. So, I’ve hung 2 posters in Interbelic, a nice bar in the middle of Bucharest’s “old center” . I just happen to know the people there 
Here are some pics to prove it:
Waiting for that Flex Builder licence…
May the force be with you, Luke! Still 5 doesn’t divide by 2. What do you do with the remainder? 2 bars and 1 poster for the contestant?
And what will be the second bar?
No! It’s not like that. You have to hang 2 posters of the 5 available in a pub of your choice.
I know a guy that owns a bar
Madalina, too. So you had backup.
And there is a second way to cheat: drink your geekiness away, THEN talk to the bartender
Wouldn’t quite work. I’d be drinking my persuasive skills away too…
So when will you find out if you win or not?
I don’t know yet…
Yes, bribing.. another popular choice
It did cross my mind 
“…product first launched ages ago before technologies like PHP or ASP”
Actually PHP was released before ColdFusion, just keeping it real.
The first version of PHP as Personal Home Page doesn’t count, as it has nothing to do with modern PHP. Today’s features of PHP were first embedded in the language at PHP 2.0 and the true PHP development started along with PHP 3, much later. But If you take it literally, yes, PHP is a month older than ColdFusion.
PS: I’ve just passed on what Ben Forta said…
[...] won the Adobe Flex Builder Pro licence I was talking about in this post. Because people complained about the low quality of the other pictures, here are some new [...]