ColdFusion Summit 2016 Recap

October 17, 2016

The ColdFusion Summit wrapped up a few days ago; I meant to blog about it sooner (and post my notes from the sessions, which I’ll do later) but as soon as the conference ended, I headed straight back to work and had a mountain of client deadlines to tackle.

Overall I think the Summit was a huge success.  Not only was it the largest number of attendees yet (500+) but over 200 people were attending for the first time!  To have that many new people (whether new to CF or just new to the idea of attending a conference to improve their skillset) is great!

This year’s Summit was at Mandalay Bay, switching it up from the last 2 years at Aria.  Mandalay Bay is fine overall but I think I prefer Aria; it seems a bit nicer with more amenities, and as a speaker sometimes those things make the trip (and prep work) less stressful.

The conference food was pretty standard (the taco bar was probably my favorite) as well as the rest of the setup. All the rooms were laid out well with multiple monitors, a laser pointer for the speaker, etc.  A couple people on Windows laptops had trouble connecting to the Wifi or the A/V gear, but that may have been just a coincidence.

Alas, my biggest pet peeve with conferences happened again at CF Summit: make it EASY to fill on session evaluations. They should be everywhere, especially on the conference website, with no logins required.  As a general rule, I don’t install apps I’ll only use for 2 days, so I never install conference apps, thus I rarely fill in session evals that require the mobile app.  Adobe, please next year put the session evals on the public website (CF.Objective had this a few years ago; why is everyone shying away from it?)

The Day 1 Keynote was a combination of Adobe providing some metrics about ColdFusion (CF is 21 years old, 50% of Fortune 500 companies use ColdFusion, etc) and the current server space, how things are changing with the rise of cloud infrastructure, AWS, RackSpace, MS Azure, and so on. It also included brief show-and-tells from Brian Peterson (CIO of Global Cash Card) and Michael Brady (CIO of Market America / Shop.com), both describing how they use ColdFusion to power their rather large, successful projects.  The information was very eye-opening, but neither speaker seemed very rehearsed — perhaps this was more technical of an audience than they normally deal with?

Some good bits of info from  Brian and Michael included:

Fear cripples developers.

Before you build, plan to grow.

The best developers spend a disproportionately more time helping other developers.

Developers must be self motivated.

Automate tests for every feature and every bug fix.

Modularity is the single most important technical factor in your ability to test and change your product quickly.

There were several other key takeaways (from Adobe).  First, Nginx support is coming soon to ColdFusion. Second, Adobe is trying to create an “all in 1 watering hole” for ColdFusion support. They play to combine the Slack channels, forums, FAQs, etc into 1 cohesive place for ColdFusion support. If this is done right, I’m all in favor of it. Personally I think Slack is the wrong medium for public support for products — it needs to be something forum/email based that can be easily searched and indexed by Google. Slack does not provide for this.  Hopefully Adobe gets this platform done soon.

Another big takeaway from the keynote was CFFiddle.  Much like JSFiddle gives JavaScript developers an easy way to share and demo code snippets, CFFuddle will do the same thing for ColdFusion! Most everyone I talked to seemed to love this and definitely felt it was a step in the right direction!  The pre-release for CFFiddle is supposed to be available soon, and I’m quite looking forward to that.

(Continuing on that thread, Rakshith gave a session in which he showed many new features coming in ColdFusion Aether. I’ll blog my notes on that shortly.)

There was no mention made of ColdFusion Builder. But there were several (very small) mentions that DreamWeaver would be getting ColdFusion support added back in. Coincidence? Or will Adobe be canceling ColdFusion Builder soon? It’ll be interesting to see what happens.  (If Adobe does indeed plan to move CF support to Dreamweaver and kill off Builder, they have a lot of work ahead of them — while I don’t use a ton of Builder plug-ins, it’s obviously got the most robust CF support of any IDE out right now. I’d hate to see the CF community lose that.)

My talk on Dependency Injection seemed to go as well as it ever does.  Any time I give this talk, I budget 10 minutes at the end for questions, and nobody has anything to ask (save for the one guy asking if I’m going to see Depeche Mode on their next tour but I don’t think that counts).  Then as soon as I turn off the mic and hop of the podium, I’ll have 5 people asking me things.  It’s great people are getting value out of the talk; I’m used to it being a mix of hands going up during the “are there any questions?” portion as well as afterward.  Something about this presentation causes the audience to react differently. I’ll have to examine the slides and see if I can change anything to help with that. (Over lunch I did get a couple great suggestions from folks on things I could add to the slide deck - now I just need another opportunity to present!)

While I wasn’t in the room when it happened, apparently there was 1 talk which included several code samples written in CFScript, to which an audience member asked, “what language is that? Is that C#?”  Obviously this is a concern.  CFScript has been around for many years now! Was this person an anomaly? Or are there big groups of ColdFusion developers that have still never even looked at CFScript?  Clearly there is still room for education among the CF community.  At least the people asking these questions were at CF Summit this year, and we’re making an effort to learn hew things (remember, over 200 first-time attendees!)  After hearing this, and talking with some attendees, I think there’s still a big percentage of CF Users that are “5-taggers” and for whatever reason aren’t exploring all the features of ColdFusion that they’re paying for.  Regardless of the reasons, we need to step up and help teach the junior developers about the proper and modern software development techniques they should be using.

There were no “clunker” sessions, everyone was well rehearsed and presented well (even with the occasional AV or wifi issue).  Some highlights for me included:

Where is ColdFusion headed? – An insight into the product roadmap, Rakshith Naresh — It’s been a while since I’ve been able to say this: EVERY feature in the next version of ColdFusion looks like something I’d use (and several were things I’d been asking for).  Can’t wait to check this out!

Testing Automation, Luis Majano - Luis always does a tremendous job speaking and I always walk away learning something new. Luis discussed a variety of testing tools (not just Box-related things) and covered a great deal of information.

Become a Security Rockstar with ColdFusion 2016, Dave Epler - Dave’s talk wasn’t as “scary” as the security talks often are.  But it was packed full of useful info about ColdFusion Security and web security in general. Dave always does a great job presenting, this talk was no exception.

Why Everyone Else Writes Bad Code, Dan Wilson — I’ve been Dan give this talk a couple times now; it’s always worth checking out. Many of the code samples and best practices Dan discusses can apply to more than just ColdFusion. I’d recommend this preso to anyone looking to make sure they’re organizing their code properly.

Building Better SQL Server Databases, Eric Cobb — This talk may have been the highlight of the conference for me (and for lots of others judging by the size of the audience -- it was completely packed).  Eric provided a lot of great insight into what happens under the hood in SQL Server.  He discussed everything from which keywords in your SQL queries affect performance, down to how the rows and packets of data are stored and what will affect their size, location, and efficiency.  It was an incredibly informative talk at a number of levels.  (I didn't take notes because I was so enthralled in what Eric was discussing; this talk should be turned into a book, or at the very least recorded for YouTube.)

Adobe did announce “see you again next year” at the closing arguments, and a roadmap for CF that goes out to at least 2030 if memory serves.

With the CF Roadmap pointing so far into the future, several new versions on the horizon, CFFiddle, a new Adobe/ColdFusion “all in 1 watering hole”  and regular boosts in attendance at CF Summit, it seems like ColdFusion shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

Congrats to Adobe on a very well put together event. Hope to see you all next year!

-nolan