yet another coldfusion blog

Well, CFUnited is over.  It was my first time there, and my first conference in a couple of years.  As usual, it was as unique and interesting an experience as I've come to expect from these types of gatherings, perhaps more so this year because I had a mix of scheduled encounters and unexpected surprises.  Also as usual, I got as much out of the convention outside of the presentations as I did inside.

The most anticipated meet-up was finally getting together the Mura/Blue River team.  The irony of our industry is that, even though I have chatted with most of the team quite regularly over the last year (ah, those hour-long feature-inundating conversations with Matt), I had no idea what any of them looked like in person.  In true geek fashion, we had to communicate via tweets to narrow down our first face-to-face.  Needless to say it was great to see them and chat around beers and burgers.

Then, of all ironies, 3000 miles away from home I ran into a developer from my own home town that I used to work with.  We'd been trying to track each other down for a few years, and it took a journey across the width of America to do it.  Colin has moved from design+CF to a real hard-driving developer, and we had some great conversations about OO in CF, frameworks, and the conference in general.

Getting a chance to chat with the "faces" of the community was great too.  You get to do fun things like call out Ben Nadel on his "favorite protein-powder mix" tweet (sorry, Ben).  One of the more memorable moments came when I ran into Mark Drew, the "wearer of many hats".  In particular it was as Mr. CFEclipse that I wanted to talk to him.  I've used it for years, but there was one tiny little, er, "issue" that bugged me: when you add a tag like <cfif>, it pops in the variable list and if you aren't careful hitting "enter" will insert the first one.  It occasionally drives me into fits, but I broached it as gently as possible.  After telling Mark this and assuming he was thinking (insert British accent) "yes, thank you for feedback, now wander off", I headed off to my next presentation.  Afterwards, as I walked by the Railo booth he was attending, he called me over.  In the hour I was gone he added a checkbox to CFEclipse to disable variable suggestions.  All for little old me (well, anybody who downloads the latest revision will have this).  What a champ!

The presentations were very enjoyable.  Effective Project Management by Mark Phillips and Requirements and Estimating by Peter Bell were a couple of my favorites.  Check out SlideSix.com and the CFUnited.com site for online versions.  The one thing I would strongly recommend to presenters, though: don't write code!  Too many presenters spent half their presentation typing, which in a classroom session is fine but too often leads too a) the audience acting as debuggers/spellcheckers, b) examples failing to run (in one case every example failed to run ... that was painful), and c) many fewer practical examples than would otherwise be possible.  This is one of the things I like best about Raymond Camden's pressos: talk - example example - talk - example example example - talk -etc.  It's fast and furious, the examples are easily digestible, and there is plenty of time for conversation.

I'm actually hard pressed to offer any criticism for Liz  and co. (see Liz, I'm earning my cap!).  The community exercises were many and well organized.  The BOF's were numerous, the social events were fun, the food was plentiful and the venue was pretty amazing.  It was admittedly a little isolated, but that usually just led to a pretty crowded pub and good times within walking distance of your bed.

All in all it was a very fine experience.  I would recommend CFUnited as a must-attend for  ColdFusion developer's of any experience level, because you are going to find many people here with similar interests and passions.  You'll walk out of CFUnited super-charged and ready to code, with a few more friends under your belt and the spark of building anticipation for the next CF gathering.

So, to all those great people I met over the last week, hazaah and much success 'til we meet again!