ColdFusion Summit Wrap-up

October 28, 2013

I'm at the airport waiting for my flight home. Thoroughly exhausted and excited about the last few days. Overall I think everyone agrees that the ColdFusion Summit was a big success. For me personally it started out a little rough, then got noticeably better as the days progressed.

I flew into Vegas on Wednesday night, after many brutally long days dealing with client issues, trying to get things to a good stopping point before I headed out to the conference (though I still knew I'd be working at least some time during the conference). Checking into the hotel went smoothly, and I was impressed that the concierge knew that I was there for the Adobe conference, and she even tried to give me directions for where I would need to be the following morning (unfortunately her instructions were wrong, but that didn't end up mattering...I figured it out).

Made it to the hotel room, worked for a couple hours, grabbed some late-night in-room dinning, and pulled the covers down on the bed to find...several long hairs and what appeared to be an old stain on the pillow. Yuck! Room Service was quick to send a maid up to give me new bedsheets which was appreciated, but it still delayed me getting to sleep for a while. I ended up sleeping only about 2 hours, and spending most of Thursday in a zombie-like daze. If I spoke to you on Thursday and you thought I was crazy or otherwise delusional, this is probably why. :) (I actually had to skip out on the last session of the day -- exhaustion got the better of me, I needed to crash for a few hours).

I was pleasantly surprised to get a voicemail the next day from the hotel manager, not only apologizing for the issue with my room, but also offering several ways to make it right. Honestly I wasn't worried about that -- I had new sheets, and all was fine. He almost refused to stop offering things though! We ended up settling on me having a super-late check-out time for Friday (which helped me get in a little touristy action before my flight) and was greatly appreciated. Despite the one issue at the beginning of the trip, service at Mandelay Bay was excellent!

Most every talk I went to was great! Jason Dean's 2 talks on security and Dan Wilson's talk on MongoDB were probably my favorites. (I saw Jason give his first talk at a previous conference, but it was good to get a refresher on some things I'd forgotten.) Both Jason and Dan have the right combination of information and humor, making their talks really easy to digest. You get all the info you want (with ultra clear and informative slide-decks, thank you!) and enough jokes thrown in to keep everything fun yet still interesting.

Other thoughts on the conference (in no particular order)...

Usually I try to submit surveys for every class I attend, via the conference website. I don't install apps on my phone that will only be there for a day or 2, so I tried doing everything from the website. We couldn't submit a review of a talk, unless we were a) logged in and b) had marked a presentation as "yes I am attending". This wasn't clear on the website, and slowed down the process of me being able to review the talks. Also, if I made a last-minute change and attended a talk that I wasn't actually scheduled for, it meant even more additional clicks before I could correct the "error" and proceed. I'm curious why the site was built this way? Is submitting "rogue surveys" a real problem at conferences? i don't remember CF.Objective or MuraCon working this way.

Also on the website, it would have been nice if the Schedule and Session pages linked to each other. This wasn't a huge deal, but it would have made the site more usable, to be able to click on a class and see the speaker's bio, start time, and session descriptions all within one click.

CFClient was the new feature everyone was talking about (good or bad). I see pros and cons to it personally. I don't think I'd use it for an app, but I can see it being a good way to make ColdFusion more relevant among the mobile space (even if just for teaching purposes...is CFClient part of the curriculum for teaching CF at colleges?) Adam Tuttle has already blogged some interesting thoughts about it here and here.

Keynote Day 1 was mostly Adobe getting everyone reenergized about ColdFusion. Elishia and Ben got the crowd amp'd up. Rakshith gave a more in-depth look at some of the features coming in CF11. In my zombie-like state, I don't remember who gave the demo of CFClient, but that also happened during this keynote.

Keynote Day 2 was given by Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University. He gave two fascinating case studies on various ways hackers can break into systems. One example included showing how a back-door was added into a codebase merely by changing a double-equal sign to a single-equal sign in one line of code! Very interesting stuff; I'd highly recommend looking into Avi's presentations further. I meant to take a ton of notes, but got so enthralled with listening to him speak that I just gave up trying to type. :)

HOW did they run out of sodas during lunch on the 2nd day? I'm still in disbelief on this one.

Wifi at the conference was excellent! Good speeds and great reliability!

For the hands-on classes, please list the "prerequisites" on the website so we can install things in advance. Granted I should have expected to need something installed, but it would have been nice to be able to tackle that the night before the class instead of during the session.

Though I had to skip the CF Hour Podcast session, I was able to have a great, honest discussion with many other user group managers about pros and cons of running a group, and better ways for us to all communicate with Adobe. I wish there hadn't been a schedule conflict for CF Hour and the UG BoF, but I think I made the best of it.

Speaking of CF Hour, ask Scott about meeting Pete Rose. :)

I had four people ask why I wasn't presenting at CF Summit. I did submit several talks but they weren't picked. Maybe I irritated somebody. :) I'm happy to present (even remotely) for your user group if there's a talk of mine you were hoping to see. Just drop me a line! (I've also just submitted several talks for CF.Objective 2014, so hopefully one of those will get picked up.)

Now to clean up the typos in my notes from the various sessions. Will post those as soon as I can.

-nolan