CF Summit Wrapup
October 19, 2014
CF Summit 2014 wrapped up yesterday. I'm currently 35,000 feet in the air, over the Atlantic, on my way to speak at CF Camp in Munich Germany. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment but that's beside the point. :)
Overall I think the CF Summit was a success. I heard no major complaints and everything from my perspective seemed to run rather smoothly. Wifi was near perfect the entire time (both in the hotel rooms and in the conference). Lunch both days was about as good of a quality as one can expect at an event like this (the salad on Thursday was excellent!). I didn't eat anything at the Liquid Lounge party, so I can't comment on that.
Staff and service at the Aria was exceptional. The rooms are incredibly clean and high-tech, the staff were some of the most courteous I've ever dealt with at a hotel, I have zero complaints and may have to book a vacation there some time to take more advantage of it.
I didn't end up taking as many notes as I usually do at conferences. Some of the talks either were more demo-based (which is totally fine) or the slide decks were so complete, that I figure I can just download those instead and save myself some typing.
Of the 2 general sessions, day 1 was my favorite. "How The Best Get Better" included some great insight into ways we as developers can become more successful by helping our clients become more successful themselves. He offered a lot of great (if albeit high-level) tips on ways we can improve and stay motivated and productive. The best take-away from day 2's general session was probably the idea that "we" are the last generation to use a keyboard and a mouse – his kids will go up to his television and instinctively try to touch it as if it were an iPad, etc. There was some time talking about "the internet of things" and how people now have refrigerators that have internet connections; I'm still at a loss as to how I should apply that info to my consulting practice.
Audio / video in the session rooms was great. Staff were very friendly and helpful, they had everything dialed in correctly for me, provided a USB clicker so I could walk around and advance my slide deck remotely. (I was surprised to be speaking in the "big room"! Is my "Dependency Injection" talk really of that much interest? Where else should I present it?)
Session highlights for me –
Jason Dean's talk on new security features in ColdFusion 10 and 11. I always learn something new about security from Jason. He scares me just enough to make me go revisit all my old code and see if I've got any security holes that need patching. His sense of humour also makes the session very enjoyable.
"ColdFusion Is Racecar Fast" was another great one. Mike Brunt and company went over a number of informational bits regarding the JVM, how to tune it, common performance issues, etc. If anybody should write a book on tuning web servers/app servers, it's Mike and his team.
"ColdFusion Internals" was excellent. [NAME] showed exactly what happens behind the scenes when compiling a CF app, and how the code is executed within the ColdFusion engine. He also discussed how these things can affect performance, and some easy ways for us as developers to take advantage of them to increase performance in our ColdFusion servers.
Charlie Arehart's talk on monitoring CF servers was of course great and packed full of useful info, but that's pretty much to be expected at this point. Has Charlie ever given a bad preso? I seriously doubt it. :) This was another one where I took a mountain of notes and left feeling inspired to try out some new techniques.
Other observations from the conference include –
I watched several talks discussing REST. I've used REST in some applications, I understand how to build REST, etc. However I still don't feel like it really beneficial. Yes my URLs all look the same (and they're a tad shorter) but so what? I can get the exact same results with HTTP GET and a little bit of discipline in how I format my URLs. But I digress. Several other people I talked with at the conference seem to feel the same way. I wonder if there is a need for an "Intro to REST and Why it is Actually Useful" preso in the near future?
In my Dependency Injection talk I asked the room to raise their hand if they'd never used DI of any kind before. About half the hands went up (and probably some others just didn't feel comfortable doing so). I got the same results when giving my "Intro to Source Control" talk earlier this year. Despite what some chunks of the developer community believe, "everyone" is not doing these things yet. There is still a need for the "older" and "beginner" topics at conferences, user groups, etc. (On that note, if you want me to speak for your user group, just drop me a line – I'm happy to do so!)
The conference ended with the announcement of CF Summit 2015 (also in Las Vegas) and a raffle for an iPhone 6. My only critique of this was, I didn't see any mention of how to enter the raffle until it was too late. I thought everyone at the conference was entered into the raffle but apparently I missed the entry process (maybe it wasn't advertised well?) But in all fairness, if the only thing I have to complain about is my inability to win a free iPhone, then the conference went over pretty well!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some sleep before speaking in Germany at CF Camp. :)
-nolan
Overall I think the CF Summit was a success. I heard no major complaints and everything from my perspective seemed to run rather smoothly. Wifi was near perfect the entire time (both in the hotel rooms and in the conference). Lunch both days was about as good of a quality as one can expect at an event like this (the salad on Thursday was excellent!). I didn't eat anything at the Liquid Lounge party, so I can't comment on that.
Staff and service at the Aria was exceptional. The rooms are incredibly clean and high-tech, the staff were some of the most courteous I've ever dealt with at a hotel, I have zero complaints and may have to book a vacation there some time to take more advantage of it.
I didn't end up taking as many notes as I usually do at conferences. Some of the talks either were more demo-based (which is totally fine) or the slide decks were so complete, that I figure I can just download those instead and save myself some typing.
Of the 2 general sessions, day 1 was my favorite. "How The Best Get Better" included some great insight into ways we as developers can become more successful by helping our clients become more successful themselves. He offered a lot of great (if albeit high-level) tips on ways we can improve and stay motivated and productive. The best take-away from day 2's general session was probably the idea that "we" are the last generation to use a keyboard and a mouse – his kids will go up to his television and instinctively try to touch it as if it were an iPad, etc. There was some time talking about "the internet of things" and how people now have refrigerators that have internet connections; I'm still at a loss as to how I should apply that info to my consulting practice.
Audio / video in the session rooms was great. Staff were very friendly and helpful, they had everything dialed in correctly for me, provided a USB clicker so I could walk around and advance my slide deck remotely. (I was surprised to be speaking in the "big room"! Is my "Dependency Injection" talk really of that much interest? Where else should I present it?)
Session highlights for me –
Jason Dean's talk on new security features in ColdFusion 10 and 11. I always learn something new about security from Jason. He scares me just enough to make me go revisit all my old code and see if I've got any security holes that need patching. His sense of humour also makes the session very enjoyable.
"ColdFusion Is Racecar Fast" was another great one. Mike Brunt and company went over a number of informational bits regarding the JVM, how to tune it, common performance issues, etc. If anybody should write a book on tuning web servers/app servers, it's Mike and his team.
"ColdFusion Internals" was excellent. [NAME] showed exactly what happens behind the scenes when compiling a CF app, and how the code is executed within the ColdFusion engine. He also discussed how these things can affect performance, and some easy ways for us as developers to take advantage of them to increase performance in our ColdFusion servers.
Charlie Arehart's talk on monitoring CF servers was of course great and packed full of useful info, but that's pretty much to be expected at this point. Has Charlie ever given a bad preso? I seriously doubt it. :) This was another one where I took a mountain of notes and left feeling inspired to try out some new techniques.
Other observations from the conference include –
I watched several talks discussing REST. I've used REST in some applications, I understand how to build REST, etc. However I still don't feel like it really beneficial. Yes my URLs all look the same (and they're a tad shorter) but so what? I can get the exact same results with HTTP GET and a little bit of discipline in how I format my URLs. But I digress. Several other people I talked with at the conference seem to feel the same way. I wonder if there is a need for an "Intro to REST and Why it is Actually Useful" preso in the near future?
In my Dependency Injection talk I asked the room to raise their hand if they'd never used DI of any kind before. About half the hands went up (and probably some others just didn't feel comfortable doing so). I got the same results when giving my "Intro to Source Control" talk earlier this year. Despite what some chunks of the developer community believe, "everyone" is not doing these things yet. There is still a need for the "older" and "beginner" topics at conferences, user groups, etc. (On that note, if you want me to speak for your user group, just drop me a line – I'm happy to do so!)
The conference ended with the announcement of CF Summit 2015 (also in Las Vegas) and a raffle for an iPhone 6. My only critique of this was, I didn't see any mention of how to enter the raffle until it was too late. I thought everyone at the conference was entered into the raffle but apparently I missed the entry process (maybe it wasn't advertised well?) But in all fairness, if the only thing I have to complain about is my inability to win a free iPhone, then the conference went over pretty well!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some sleep before speaking in Germany at CF Camp. :)
-nolan