CF Objective Recap and Highlights
May 17, 2014
It's Saturday afternoon, I'm at the airport, that must mean CF Objective is officially over. Overall I think the conference was a great success and was run more smoothly than last year (which was the first year at this location). Wifi was excellent throughout the entire conference (both the hotel wifi and the conference specific wifi). Hotel staff were incredibly friendly and helpful. Food was as good as one could hope for from conference food.
The keynote presentation sparked some good conversation over lunch about how we can improve diversity in the web development community. It got beyond just "well the door is open if someone wants to walk in" and quickly moved to "we need to help people thru the door, go out and find people and be more proactive in helping to include anyone that wants to get into programming". I was initially a little disappointed in the keynote talk, as my interpretation of the title ("Redesigning the Interface: Making Software Development Make Sense to Everyone") was that she'd be discussing new techniques for UI/UX work, or something along those lines. However after the lunchtime discussion, I no longer had any quips.
Other highlights for me included...
1) Jason Dean's talk on JavaScript – I learned a metric ton about various nuances in the language. Jason always has great slide decks and regular doses of humour thrown into his presentations. This one was no exception.
2) Sharon DiOrio's talk on Angular JS – I've seen several demos on Angular. Sharon's was very straight forward and easy to follow. Based on the session description, I was worried this talk would require more Angular experience than I've had thus far, but she started at the beginning and kept my interest the entire time.
3) Kai Koenig's talk on "The JVM Is Your Friend" – I've seen variations of this talk a few times. I've always gotten lost. Kai's talk was the magic one that made a few topics finally "click" for me. I'm no longer scared of the JVM arguments I didn't previously understand. :)
Doing the speaker evals was a bit of a challenge this year because they all HAD to be done via a mobile app. Personally I prefer to type my evals on a real laptop keyboard (as I type much faster than way). I suspect this affected both the number of evals done, and the quality of feedback included in each eval. I spoke with the conference staff a little, and I understand this was a technical "limitation" with how things were set up. Hopefully next year we can do evals both via the mobile app and website.
I've blogged notes from all the sessions I attended. I ended up skipping a few presos to spend more time warming up before my I gave my presentations. Both of my talks seemed to go well, though I haven't seen the evals yet; perhaps I just jinxed myself. :)
Thanks everyone for attending both my sessions. If anyone runs a user group and would like me to give those talks, just drop me a line.
Thanks to the CF.Objective staff for putting together yet another excellent conference. Until next year...
-nolan
The keynote presentation sparked some good conversation over lunch about how we can improve diversity in the web development community. It got beyond just "well the door is open if someone wants to walk in" and quickly moved to "we need to help people thru the door, go out and find people and be more proactive in helping to include anyone that wants to get into programming". I was initially a little disappointed in the keynote talk, as my interpretation of the title ("Redesigning the Interface: Making Software Development Make Sense to Everyone") was that she'd be discussing new techniques for UI/UX work, or something along those lines. However after the lunchtime discussion, I no longer had any quips.
Other highlights for me included...
1) Jason Dean's talk on JavaScript – I learned a metric ton about various nuances in the language. Jason always has great slide decks and regular doses of humour thrown into his presentations. This one was no exception.
2) Sharon DiOrio's talk on Angular JS – I've seen several demos on Angular. Sharon's was very straight forward and easy to follow. Based on the session description, I was worried this talk would require more Angular experience than I've had thus far, but she started at the beginning and kept my interest the entire time.
3) Kai Koenig's talk on "The JVM Is Your Friend" – I've seen variations of this talk a few times. I've always gotten lost. Kai's talk was the magic one that made a few topics finally "click" for me. I'm no longer scared of the JVM arguments I didn't previously understand. :)
Doing the speaker evals was a bit of a challenge this year because they all HAD to be done via a mobile app. Personally I prefer to type my evals on a real laptop keyboard (as I type much faster than way). I suspect this affected both the number of evals done, and the quality of feedback included in each eval. I spoke with the conference staff a little, and I understand this was a technical "limitation" with how things were set up. Hopefully next year we can do evals both via the mobile app and website.
I've blogged notes from all the sessions I attended. I ended up skipping a few presos to spend more time warming up before my I gave my presentations. Both of my talks seemed to go well, though I haven't seen the evals yet; perhaps I just jinxed myself. :)
Thanks everyone for attending both my sessions. If anyone runs a user group and would like me to give those talks, just drop me a line.
Thanks to the CF.Objective staff for putting together yet another excellent conference. Until next year...
-nolan