MAXUP - Adobe's Barcamp unconference

I'll be heading out to Las Vegas a week from Monday to attend Adobe's annual MAX conference which will be a pretty typical tech conference showcasing Adobe's new technology. But there will also be another conference in the desert, one that may be more valuable to developers and people in the trenches. Adobe is running a Barcamp style conference, dubbed MAXUP, in parallel which will have sessions covering a lot of interesting Rich Internet Application topics. It is scheduled for October 24th - 25th and will also be entirely free for anyone who wants to drop by.

MAXUP is the brain child of Ted Patrick, and he worked with a team at Adobe to put it on. Mike Potter, Jonathan Wall, Ed Sullivan, Ben Forta, Matt Chotin and Mike Chambers, all pretty prominent Adobe names, helped out with the planning. It's very cool to see people within Adobe "get it" and I think this is a way for them to reach developers in a new way.

While it will obviously be very Adobe-centric, I think it can be legitimately be called the first Rich Internet Application Barcamp. There will be sessions on Flex. Mike Chambers is going to do a couple of sessions on Adobe's upcoming Apollo project and heavy hitters like MySpace and Ebay are going to be talking about some of their more cutting-edge initiatives in the Rich Internet Application space. Adobe employees will also be presenting some interesting sessions on how to use the technology.

This is really going to be a developer conference, and it isn't going to be filled with a lot of the marketing hype that comes with so many other conferences. I really hope to see another MAXUP in the near future, because I think the sessions they have lined up and the buzz within the Adobe developer community show there is a lot of excitement. If this was closer to San Francisco, I think you'd see a lot of people coming to check it out and you would get a lot more participation. But as it stands right now, if you're going to be in Vegas October 24th and 25th, you should come to MAXUP - and really, how many excuses do you need to spend a couple of days in Vegas?