CFUnited 2009

I have had some time to reflect on awesome week so I thought I would share my thoughts with you. This year was my 2nd year attending CFUnited and the 1st year I was speaking. The main reason I love going to the conferences is catching up with all of the great people in our community and this was no different.

The conference to me was a huge success and I think we all owe the Stellr team a great big round of applause. I don't know personally all of the work the team put it in but I have been following them and it seems like all of their hard work paid off. The venue this year was a huge step up from last year and for me one of the best venues for a conference ever. The pool party on Thursday night was also a lot of fun and it was great to see so many people in one place.

The conference of course is also about the learning. The keynote on day 1 was given by Ben Forta, Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan. We heard a lot of information about ColdFusion 9 and a new announcement about the licensing changes for cloud computing. Personally I don't do a lot of cloud computing but others seem really excited by the new licensing so I will have to read up on it. The sessions were jam packed this year and seemed like every session there were 2 really great sessions that I wanted to see.

The day 2 keynote was given by Joe Rinehart and for me It was the highlight of the conference. Joe is one of the smartest guys I have ever meet and he always seems to be incredibly prepared for his presentations so I knew it was going to be a good one. The 2nd day keynotes in the past were basically sales pitches and for me were really a waste of my time. Joe's presentation was titled CF is dead...Long live CF. Joe spoke about how ColdFusion started out and how it evolved to the language we all love today. The main point of the presentation was that we can as a community can't keep using the argument that ColdFusion makes it easy to build database driven applications. That very well may of been true 5 years ago but the web is changing and technologies are catching. Instead we need to talk about the enterprise applications being built on top of ColdFusion and the applications that are inspiring others. He showed some demos of applications built on ColdFusion that are really pushing the bar. I was so happy for my good Friend Todd Sharp when Joe gave a demo of SlideSix. It's great to see Todd & SlideSix getting some notice for the hard work he has put in.

Finally I think the conference was a real wake up call for me, more this year than ever. I live in a confined space back home where I think everything I do is good and that I am on the right path. After spending another week we some of the smartest people in our area of work I realized that I have a lot of hard work ahead of me. It was always a mini dream of mine to be become a programmer and all though I realized this dream later in life it was still a dream. I know it may sound silly that someone actually wanted to write computer code but I looked up to a couple programmers when I was younger and really was inspired by them. I have come up with some bullet points that I really plan on working harder at over the next year and yes I am defining a year as 1 CFunited to another!

• Community - I know I spend time being involved in the community already but I really think I can do more.
• Write more articles - I want to further my writing skills by branching more outside of just my blog
• Presentations - I want to present more so that i can become a better presenter. I really enjoy teaching and I want to get better at it.
• Open source - I have 1 real project that I contribut to the community and to me that is just unacceptable.

This entry was posted on August 16, 2009 at 11:21 PM and has received 2432 views. Comments 1 | Print this entry.