An Architect's View

Lots of people have blogged Ben Forta's keynote so I won't reiterate that. I'm really pleased to see Tim Buntel is back on board - welcome back Tim! I loved Jason Delmore's Scorpio sneak peak - seeing ColdFusion generate a Breeze presentation made me drool (I can't tell you how much I loathe PowerPoint!). Next up was my talk on factories - essentially a "Why ColdSpring?" presentation - which seemed to go pretty well (although it ran shorter than usual, not sure why... at least there were plenty of questions from the audience). Shlomy Gantz's talk on "pest control" was my choice for the pre-lunch slot although I missed the first few minutes. Lots of good information here: be systematic about debugging, plan and document your testing and troubleshooting processes, use version control, use a bug tracker (he showed Ray's LightHouse Pro as one alternative). Shlomy also covered a wide variety of language techniques for debugging, including <cftimer> (which I use a lot) and <cftrace> (which I don't use - but probably will after this talk!). Shlomy's a great speaker and always has something worthwhile to say! You can download his code and presentation (from his blog). Then my day kind of fell apart. My plan was, after lunch, speaker buddy for Joe Rinehart (Ten Things You Need To Know) then Jeff Peters (Supercharging Fusebox Project Management) and John Paul Ashenfelter (Agile ColdFusion). The reality was that lunch turned into a long series of interesting discussions with a steady stream of ColdFusion developers that left me catching just the last ten minutes of John Paul's talk! I bumped into Jeff Peters and had dinner with him and two other Fuseboxers (at the Silver Diner two blocks from the conference, which does awesome crab cakes!). Lots of Fusebox-related discussions over dinner, as you can imagine. In fact, quite a few of my discussions today have been around Fusebox and several people took advantage of my iPod Shuffle to obtain a copy of the public Release Candidate of Fusebox 5. I went to the Simon Horwith / Hal Helms celebrity death match, coming in just before the end of the first hour and staying for the second hour (seriously!). You had to be there... My feeling is that Hal won by two falls although there was clearly no submission from Simon. Eventually I got to the bar, where discussions continued (including one with Simon about the death match) and I extricated myself after midnight (the final ColdFusion discussion of the day continued right up to the elevator!). Overall, it was a very tiring day and I was a bit annoyed I didn't actually get to most of the sessions I wanted to see. However, it was great to feel the "buzz" in the ColdFusion community: excitement about Flex, excitement about Adobe's commitment to ColdFusion and, something that warmed my heart, excitement about Fusebox 5. I've done my mandatory "catch up" on work email now and I'm looking forward to my five hours of sleep before I do it all again tomorrow!