Day 1 at cf.Objective()

As Ray Camden blogged earlier here and here , there was a "near" announcement on a ColdFusion open source initiative. The slide didn't say that CF's going open source, but there was a bug tracker and a steering committee, among other things. It's all on Ray's blog. Unfortunately, a fellow attendee had a medical emergency right at that exact moment, and we never got to see the rest of the presentation. How ironic! I am not sure who he was, but I heard he had a seizure, and he's back at the conference and doing OK.

My sessions were interesting. I watched the Coldbox 101 presentation by Luis Majano. I have seen him doing it before, but this version was updated to 2.6. Next I attended Michael Dinowitz's session on Caching and Persistence for Performance. It was very good, and although it covered many things I already knew, there were a few things Michael covered that I'll take back to the office.

After lunch, I caught the Enterprise Development with Mach-ii session by Matt Woodward. Honestly, I probably could have skipped this one, as there wasn't anything in there I didn't know, but I went there to show a little moral support. :-) Next, I caught the second half of John Paul Ashenfelter's Agile Bootcamp, which would have been more useful had I caught the first half. My last session was Peter Bell on Software Product Lines. The session was good, although there wasn't much in there I gleaned from it I didn't already know. This was one of those slots where I could have gone to any of them and it wouldn't have been a bad choice.

Of the ones I missed, I heard good things about Nic Tunney's presentation on an Intelligent Approach to OOP in CF. I kind of wish I had been able to attend this one. It sounds like Nic talked more in detail about a couple of points I will make in my presentation tomorrow. Others that got a good buzz were Brian Kotek's Code Generation talk, Joe Reinhart's Model-Glue 3, and Laura Arguello's talk on Mate, a tag-based event driven Flex framework.

After the sessions, we started an impromptu game... we were playing "cf.Objective() skiball". It involved throwing a rubber ball between the up and down escalator and seeing how far you could make it go up before it would come down. I don't know if anyone did any better after I left, but I had gotten it up the farthest: One of my tosses reached past the seventh "rung" (only a few feet from the top).

After that, I came up for a bit. I was going to go to see Iron Man with a big gang, but they left before I came down. Instead, I had drinks and dinner with Terrence Ryan, Steve Rittler, Brian Swartzfager and Adam Crump. I came back to the bar and had more conversation about various things with Todd Sharp, Brian Swartzfager, Jennifer Larkin, Sean Corfield, Joe Reinhart, Chris Scott, Paul Marcotte and Charlie Griefer... among others. Although there was a lot of conversation around other things, including dogs and cats, we also talked about ColdFusion and one of the things I am going to talk about during tomorrow's presentation - that you shouldn't try to make ColdFusion do something it's not good at - creating large arrays of objects.

More on my presentation in my next post.