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CFUnited 09 Venue Mini Review and Vote for My Sessions

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:48:00 GMT

Earlier this year I wrote a detailed venue review for CFUnited 2008 helped by the fact I live two blocks from the Washington convention center. CFUnited 09 will take place at the Lansdowne Resort which is a little over 30 miles from my house, and I've been there only once so I can't give as detailed a review.

I can tell you a few things about it though; its a very nice resort, its isolated so the networking will be great, and the room rate prices are great value (and use a CF powered registration system). Also, if you fly into Dulles its very easy to get to. If you liked the North Bethesda location (home of CFUnited 05-07) then you should like the Landsdowne Resort since its a bigger and slightly fancier version.

I submitted two topics for CFUnited 09:

From Eight to Centaur: New Programming Tips and Techniques
Centaur promises new ways to code ColdFusion applications that represent the biggest changes to the core language since CFMX 6.1. Ideas floated at the CFUNITED 08 Keynote included creating UDFs and CFCs with cfscript, a New keyword, cffinally and cfcontinue, implicit getters and setters. This session will walk through specific examples of new ways of coding and discuss the pros and cons.

If a scheduled task fails in the woods, does it make a noise?
Scheduled Tasks and Event Gateways can provide a vital cog of applications but what happens when they fail? This session will look at the monitoring system in place at Interfolio to keep our systems running smoothly. Previously we used a collection of log file checking and sending emails. The new system wraps tasks around a monitoring register, has a front end dashboard that shows the current status of each task and will has mechanisms to control the frequency of how many text messages or emails to send when problems occur.

Vote for them to be included:
http://cfunited.com/go/survey/166

CFUnited Evaluations

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 05:30:00 GMT

CFUnited was the first conference that I spoke at so I was eagerly awaiting the evaluations of my "Creating, Manipulating and Printing" session to see what other people thought.

Fifty-six people returned evaluations, about half the room I believe, and fifty-five of them gave me a score. CFUnited evaluations have four categories (Quality of materials presented, Knowledge of the topic, Amount of materials presented, Presenter's instructional ability) each ranked out of 5 for a total possible score of 20. I got a 17.9 average which I am quite pleased with.

Some of the positive comments:

"smoothest flow of all the presentations"

"sequence of doc creation > review code > show result made the process very clean"

"very good succinct examples/code samples"

"simple real world examples"

"clear, organized, covered what was described"

"quick enough to allow for lots of questions"

"question time"

I finished about 15 minutes early and used the extra time to show off one more example that was not in the slides and then had an extended question and answer time. Lots of good questions and some that I could not answer but that others in the room could.

"everything"

this person then gave me 17/20!

The negative comments/stuff to work on:

"presenter was a little monotone"

"needs humor"

I would agree with both these comments. I had not been sleeping well that week so was a little tired which resulted in a more monotone delivery. I would like to bring more humor into my presentations but did not want to try and do too much the first time out. Definitely something to work on for next time. Have you heard the one about the pdf file, text file and image? No, well come to my next talk...

"more complex examples showing the advanced features"

"would like real world examples"

This session was in the bootcamp level so I did not want to go to advanced but perhaps this is something to add towards the end of the presentation. As for real world examples I created a fake application (the Dundler-Mifflin proposal maker) to try and make the examples as life like as possible. Others commented that they felt the examples where real world so this might just vary from person to person.

"the room temperature"
Most conferences have ridiculously cold rooms. The rooms at CFUnited just seemed cold!

"a bit too fast"
Definitely something to take in mind for next time and especially when giving bootcamp sessions though others seemed to like it.

"please repeat questions for all to hear"
Yes. Will do, I did for some questions but know I dropped the ball on others.

Overall I am quite happy with how it turned out and will be thinking of topics to apply to speak on at next years conferences. Is there anything you would like to hear?

Its a Wrap, CFUnited 08

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:45:00 GMT

CFUnited this year was a fantastic conference, here are some of my thoughts in random order:

Adobe Keynote. Considering this was a non release year the keynote was very exciting from the educational license to the language enhancements to the AIR integration. (In comparison the 06 keynote about Connect integration left many flat.) Others have provided way better summaries, the main thing I took away was the commitment of Adobe to making CF better.
It was great to meet and talk to so many other developers. Both those in the blogsphere, where putting a face to a blog was great, and those without blogs. I had many interesting conversations about programming and other topics as well! It was also a real treat to talk to members of the Adobe CF team (even if my attempts to get them to spill the beans on other new features consistantly failed -- Rupesh you are too sharp for me ;))
Great sessions. I took something out of every session I went to and many where excellent.
The location. The wireless was great, there was enough room in each session that there was no need to reserve spaces ahead of time and enough room to get around. I like the airiness of the convention center. Lunch was good on Wednesday, poor on Thursday and excellent on Friday.
Speaking for the first time. I found this a little more nerve racking in the build up than I was expecting (take the advice and speak to a user group or two first) , still once I got going I really enjoyed it and hopefully those attending my sessions got something out of it.

Many thanks to Liz, Elliott and Nafisa and everyone else at Teratech for all their hard work on CFUnited and I'll see you next year!

CFUnited Presentations Posted: Intro to CFML plus Creating, Manipulating and Printing PDFs

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:39:00 GMT

Here are the presentations and code from my two CFUnited talks. I enjoyed giving the sessions and if you have any questions please let me know.

Creating, Manipulating and Printing PDFs

Presentation (PDF) and Code

Intro to CFML as a language

Presentation (PDF) and Code

New CFUnited Location is Great News Plus Review of Area

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:58:00 GMT

I am very excited that CFUnited has moved to the Washington Convention Center this year as the facility and the surrounding area are awesome. I may well be biased though: I live two blocks from the convention center! Here is a review of what to expect in the center and the area beyond.

The venue

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center (as it will be renamed soon) is a lovely convention center boasting the largest public art collection in DC. Spread over six city blocks the center is well designed and avoids the "big hall" mentality of many older convention centers. One small criticism I had of the Bethesda location was that session rooms where spread out over multiple floors. Having been in the Washington Convention Center many times and talking to Liz it seems that this year all session rooms will be off one hallway about a city block long. Hallway is an inaccurate description since its a 4-5 story glass viewfront of the street. As CFUnited gets bigger I like the idea of it staying intimate and I think that will happen this year.

The conference hotel is a top quality hotel, but one big plus this year, is no need for a shuttle for the overflow. Within walking distance are four or five other hotels and for the bigger conferences I see people walking up to half a mile to the center. Not a fan of hotels then try the Morrison-Clark Historic Inn (ColdFusion site :)) and the DC Guest House. June is a popular month in DC so book your hotels soon.

The area

The convention center is located just a few blocks north of downtown DC (an area also refered to as Chinatown, Penn Quarter and Gallery Place) and right above the Mt. Vernon Square / Convention Center metro stop. Downtown DC has been revitalized over the past 5 to 10 years and is now full of bars, restaurants and museums all partially inspired by the building of the Verizon Center (at the time it was the MCI Center). I'll start with the bars since thats probably of most interest.

Bars

In the convention center but accessed from 9th Street is the Old Dominion Brewhouse. My favorite is the basement Rocket bar with a good beer selection, pool tables and shuffle board. There is also a good Irish bar, the Irish Channel, a so-so one, Fado's and a beer hall, RFD, with over 30 beers on tap and 300 (yes, 300) others in bottles. An American classic is Clydes (ColdFusion site :)), a fashionable bowling and bar called Lucky Strike, which is above Bar Louie a casual American bar and a sports bar called The Green Turtle. All of those will pretty much take you wearing whatever (and make good places for watching Euro 2008 or other sports) but if you are looking for something more upscale these are your bars: Indeblue, Zaytina, Oya, Zola and Poste.

Restaurants

Downtown DC caters for every budget and time of day. At the high end are the four restaurants listed above (Indeblue, Oya, Zola and Poste) in the bars section -- DC liquor licenses are such that most bars are restaurants as well. Of special note is Zaytina which serves tapas sized portions of Mediterranean fare at good prizes. It also has two sister restaurants, the original Jaleo serving Spanish tapas and Oyamel featuring Mexican tapas. Rosa Mexicana also serves up full portions of Mexican food.

If you love wine you will love Proof, part wine bar, part restaurant. Likewise, if you love Vegetarian food go to Vegetate (the only restaurant listed thats north of the center). Two good Indian restaurants are Mehak and the much more fashionable Rasika. Trendy pizza is served up by Ella's and Matchbox which has more of a scene. Burma, serves, well Burmese food (well worth trying even if its just to eat cocaine chicken) and is above the excellent Kanlaya serving Thai, sushi can be found at Sushi Go Round and its sister restaurant Thai Chili serves well you can guess. Chinatown, is extremely small, but has many Chinese restaurants including China Garden.

Interesting, quick to places like California Tortilla (headquarters in Maryland!), Chop't serves up salads and Teaism won't break the bank but will fill you up. Fast food can also be found with McDonalds, Duncan Donuts, Chipotle, Five Guys and Burger King all around. There are some chain restaurants as well like Legal Sea Foods, Ruby Tuesdays and Hooters. Coffee wise there are enough Starbucks around (5 off the top of my head plus one in the center) to cafinate us all plus some more local places also serving breakfast like EuroCafe, Breakwells opposite the center and Cozy Cafe Corner which also has free wi-fi.

Museums & Monuments

Popular sites include the White House, Washington Monument, Holocaust Museum, Vietnam Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, National Gallery of Art, Portrait Gallery (currently featuring Stephen Colbert) all of which are free. And that is a distinctive feature about many of DC's popular museum: they are free. All of the Smithsonian museums are free thanks to donors (including the Federal government) and many others also follow this model. The National Building Museum, my favorite, is a stunning building and with interesting exhibits including one on DC which explains its history and relationship with its federal overlords (we have no representation in Congress).

Moving in to paid museums the most popular is the Spy Museum, looking for wax then there is Madame Tussards, and opening by this summer are the National Museum of Crime & Punishment and the Newseum. Plenty of good art galleries like the Corcoran and the Phillips Collection.

There are also plenty of theaters (second to only New York in tickets sold), blockbuster movie theaters and indie movie theaters.

Everything I've mentioned, except for a few of the memorials and museums, are in walking distance of the convention center and Hyatt hotel but there is more to DC if you are prepared to get on the metro or bus. So come to CFUnited and add on a day or three to visit DC. You won't be disappointed!

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...