Wow, time flies!
Seems like only yesterday I was doing the closing remarks on the last cf.Objective(ANZ), and now it's already around the corner.
This year is going to be great once again, with lots of top notch speakers and a program that is going to be really interesting as well!
The sessions that I'm personally looking forward to are:
Functional Programming with Clojure & CFML - the best of both worlds?
I'm personally getting more and more into functional programming (or even just writing my OO code with more of a functional style). It's definitely something that is picking up steam all over the place, so I'm keen to see what Kai has to say.
Railo CLI
I'm doing a lot of (J)Ruby work these days, and I'm pretty much living in the console with the great tooling it has in this department. I'm really keen to see what advancements that Railo has made in this area, and see if there are opportunities there for cross pollination.
Building the Olympics
This should have some very interesting war stories of a site that is truly web scale.
Using nginx With ColdFusion
I've always been intrigued by nginx as I've seen it used in many places, but never looked into it itself. I know people that swear by it, so I'll be interested to learn more about nginx.
The Ugly Truth about Frameworks
This is just going to be fun :)
What sessions are you guys looking forward to?
On the 2 Developers Down Under podcast that myself and Kai Koenig run, we've been interviewing speakers from the cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex conference, which was strongly inspired by the CFHour podcast (okay, we stole the idea), to give listeners a taste of the content of the conference, and let them get to the know the speakers that will be presenting.
We've managed two episodes so far, speaking to Tanya Gray, AJ Dyka, AJ Mercer, Andrew Meyers, Bjorn Schultheiss, Geoff Bowers (our first return guest) and Robin Hilliard, with plenty more to come!
It's been a lot of fun talking to everyone, and I think it's going to make choosing which sessions to go to at the confernence even more difficult, as they all sound incredibly interesting.
So if you are interested in getting a taste of what our presenters will be showing off at cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex, make sure to tune into the 2DDU podcast.
In case you missed the hullabaloo, registration recently opened for cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex.
I'm really excited about this years speaker line up, and honestly think that the sessions we have this year
are the best we've ever had. We got awesome content on testing,
frameworks, continuous integration, version control, and more.
Basically, if it's used in enterprise software development, I think
we've just about got it covered.
We've also got four pre-conference workshops
also lined up as well, so there is an extra opportunity there to get
some extra learning in, on top of the pretty incredible line up of
speakers we have as well.
It should be noted that there will be no
extensions on the early bird for cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex, so make sure
to get your registration in early!
As you can tell, I'm really excited about this year's conference, so I look forward to seeing you all there!
So if you are interested in speaking on ColdFusion, Flex, or just generally anything enterprisey and/or software development related, make sure to have a look, and put in an entry.
Conference speaking is always an awesome and incredibly rewarding experience, and a great opportunity to learn, and also impart your knowledge to others. While it may be extremely nerve wracking to get up in front of an audience, the rewards are well worth it, let me assure you!
Either way, I look forward to seeing you all there!
cf.Objective(ANZ) is back again for another year, with it's usual two tracks of amazing enterprise ColdFusion goodness, as well as a whole new dedicated Flex and Flash track.
No where else in Australia and New Zealand will you be able to get this type of delicious ColdFusion learning, combined with a sumptuous feast of front end Flex and Flash content, so make sure to mark your calendars now!
Check the cf.Objective(ANZ) website for details including dates and venue.
Also - if you are interested in sponsoring, download the sponsorship guide, which can be found on the sponsors page .
Our wonderful sponsor Fasthit
has kindly provided us, not only with a ticket to give away to a
student living in Australia or New Zealand, but is also paying for
flights and accommodation as well for the lucky winner.
The rules are simple:
- You must be an Australian or New Zealand Resident
- You have to have a valid student identification.
- You must be under 25 years of age.
- You need to send an email to contest@cfobjective.com.au, with no more than 200 words stating why you would be the best person to win this competition.
...and that is really about it.
The winner with the best entry will be announced on the 1st of September.
If
you are a student, make sure you enter for a chance to win! If you
aren't a student, but know someone that is, make sure to pass on the
message.
For more details, have a look at this
news post.
There has been so much going on with
cf.Objective(ANZ), that I haven't even had time to blog about it!
In case you missed the announcements, the
pricing is now online, with the early bird price being lower than last years, at $749.00 including GST, valid until the 31st of August.
There are a series of
1 day workshops the day before the conference as well, covering ColdFusion Performance tuning, Flex 4 and ColdFusion, and Arduino hardware with ColdFusion.
Charlie Arehart,
Kai Koenig, and
Justin McLean are running these workshops respectively, and you couldn't ask for better instructors.
While each track of the 2 day conference has yet to be finalised, almost all of the sessions that will be available are
now online , and we have some fantastic content again this year, with some speakers that I am very excited about. The usual slew of amazing ANZ dignitaries will be joining us, also with international speakers such as
Gert Franz,
Mark Drew,
Mark Blair,
Mike Brunt and
Tim Buntel (Or maybe 'semi-international' would be a better fit? Mark Blair moved to San Francisco and then came back, Tim Buntel now lives in Sydney... ;o) ).
I'm really happy with the way this conference is coming together this year, and providing some really unique ColdFusion content for the ANZ region. We've got some great training, some great speakers, some great sessions, it's looking like it's going to be a fantastic time all around.
You can
download the full code samples I used in my Rapid OO talk that I gave most recently at
cf.Objective(ANZ) , and previously at
cf.Objective() .
Before people ask, I don't tend to post slides, as they are generally only pictures, and tend to have no context without me talking next to them.
That being said, I'll have a chat with the CFMeetup crew, and see if they would like me to give the presentation there, so there is a recording for posterities sake, and for those who couldn't make those conferences.
I can't believe it was well over a year ago I was sitting around with the steering committee of
cf.Objective() , and the conversation turned to 'What do you think of the idea of doing this conference in Australia?', it feels just like yesterday.
Now we're only
one week away from
cf.Objective(ANZ)!!!
If you haven't already
registered , there are still spots available, so make sure you grab them quick! You don't want to miss out on hanging out with super-top-programmers like
Justin McLean ,
Andrew Muller ,
Dan Wilson ... oh, and did we mention
Ben Forta and
Terry Ryan are coming? (like anyone missed that!).
See you all in a week!
In case you missed the tweets, I am very pleased to announce that
Ben Forta will be joining us in Melbourne, Australia for
cf.Objective(ANZ) !
Ben will be joining ColdFusion Evangelist
Terry Ryan to represent Adobe ColdFusion here in Australia, and the two of them will be around to chat to all attendees about ColdFusion and the Adobe ecosystem.
Don't forget that the early bird price comes to a close on the 12th of October, which is fast approaching, so please make sure you get yourself registered so you can take advantage of it.
See you all when I get back from MAX.
It's been a bit of a bumpy road getting here, but registration for
cf.Objective(ANZ), being held in Melbourne Australia on the 12th and 13th of November is finally open!
The
program is full with a stack of really interesting presentations, ranging from
JVM Tuning and Optimisation, to
ModelGlue 3: Gesture, all the way to
Connecting hardware up to ColdFusion!
We have an international cast of speakers, including notable luminaries such as
Dan Wilson and
Mike Brunt, as well as many talented speakers from the Australia and New Zealand Regions, including
Geoff Bowers,
Robin Hilliard,
Kai Koenig and many,
many more.
Helping
organising a conference over international borders has been quite the
learning experience, however I am very proud to be part of the steering
committee that is bringing cf.Objective(ANZ) to the Pacific Region.
If
you are looking to learn about enterprise development, and hang out and
talk to a slew of like minded developers for two days,
register for the conference, and come on down! It's going to be a great time!
While I am recovering from the Australian
WebDU conference, a few days before that started I got off a plane after the end of the wonderful
cf.Objective() conference.
I have to say, this year's cfObjective() was the best organised out of all the years I have been to. As per usual, the content was stellar, the hotel was lovely, and it was an absolute pleasure to catch up with everyone at the conference. I have to give a big 'congratulations' to Jared, Steven, Jim and the rest of the cf.Objective() crew for putting together such a smooth and professional conference.
I had the pleasure of doing two sessions,
Rapid OO Development with ColdFusion Frameworks, which covered a variety of techniques on how to increase your development speed when building OO models, and I was very happy to see that it seemed to have been very well received. I had one attendee let me know that 'Now I know
why I'm using ColdSpring! I was using it before, but now I know
why', which is an amazing thing to hear as a presenter, that you've managed to create an 'Aha!' moment for someone.
I also did my
Introduction to Building Applications with Transfer ORM, which was a repeat of the session that I did last year. Unfortunately
Ray Camden couldn't make it to do his
Transfer session, so I was called in at the last minute to take his place.
The big news that we announced at cf.Objective(), is that I will now be the lead developer on the
ColdSpring project. Since Chris Scott's major focus these days is the Swiz Flex framework, he decided it was time to pass on the reigns, and since I tend to talk to him regularly about Cold/Spring, have contributed code to ColdSpring , and know about running an Open Source project, he seemed to think I would be a good fit. I'm pretty excited about the opportunity, and have discussed some great ideas with theColdSpring development group, of which Chris is going to stay on as lead architect. I expect we will start off by building the infrastructure around the project, e.g. a centralised wiki, ticket tracker etc, and then move on to some more interesting items.
The obvious question there is, of course, what does this mean for Transfer? (I think I need to start writing down how many times I've been asked if it's 'Dead'. Does anyone actually expect a 'yes' for an answer?), and quite frankly, I don't see this impacting on Transfer much at all, simply because this is going to be code that I would have probably ended up writing on ColdSpring anyway, but it is now a more formalised relationship. When I run into a feature or a bug on an Open Source project, that I want to be implemented, my first natural reaction is to start looking into the code, and writing the feature. This was first exemplified by my contribution toColdSpring of
annotation based pointcuts. There are several aspects of ColdSpring I wanted to improve on, so it was just a natural reaction for me to end up writing code for it.
As stated, the content at cf.Objective() was brilliant as per usual, with my own personal highlights being, Advanced ColdFusion Server Administration (Adam Lehman), Advanced ColdFusion 9 ORM (Terry Ryan) and ColdFusion Portlets (Adam Haskell).
Thinking about the content, I have a little confession to make, that I realised on the way back from cf.Objective() this year. I have a tendency to go to the wrong sessions when at a conference. This may sound like a weird thing, but I realised the last few years I tend to go to sessions that I already know a lot about, just to see if they say something a little bit extra that I can add to my knowledge base. Quite often I end up walking out feeling like I haven't added much to my repertoire. Really what I should be doing is going (mostly) to sessions in which I know
absolutely nothing about, which means I actually get the best return on the my investment in the conference. While it may not be specifically applicable to what I'm currently doing, at the very least it will inspire me to do some interesting new things, and may give me some knowledge that I can then apply at some point in the future. This is a philosophy I plan on applying to all future conferences that I attend.
Finally, I also had the opportunity to be part of a
CFConversations round-table on the second night of the conference.
Brian Meloche,
Andy Powell,
Andy Matthews and I had a really good chat about the conference in general, our thoughts on some of Adobe's upcoming products, various other topics relating to ColdFusion. It was lots of fun to do, and you can download and/or read more about it here.
Again, thanks to all the cf.Objective() crew, and look forward to seeing many of you again at cf.Objective(ANZ).
Several days ago, cf.Objective(ANZ) put out a call for speakers.
For those who have missed the announcements, cf.Objective(ANZ), is bringing the famous cf.Objective() conference to Melbourne Australia.
To steal some of the copy straight from the website:
Topics we're looking for fit into (but are not limited to) the following major categories:
Architecture and Design:
OOP, Design Patterns, Frameworks, Modeling, Refactoring Legacy Apps, Persistence etc.
RIA:
LC DS and CF, Ajax/Flex with CF, BlazeDS and CF etc.
Process and Methodology:
Agile Development, SOA, Managing large CF architectures, Debugging and Metrics etc.
Integration and Testing:
CF and Java, Build and Deployment processes, Server tuning, Unit Testing etc.
Please let us know by April 24 2009 if you're interested by emailing speakers@cfobjective.com.au
with a short blurb about yourself and the topics you'd be interested in presenting on.
cf.Objective(ANZ)
will provide speaker accommodation for the night of the 12th to the
13th of November 2009 at the conference venue (Renaissance Hotel in
Melbourne). At this stage we unfortunately can't provide any further
financial assistance with travel cost or other expenses.
So if you wish to speak, or if you wish to hear about a particular topic, please feel free to send an email to the above address to let people know.
If you want to know more, you can check out the website , sign up to the website, and also follow the twitter feed !
Hope to see you all there!
Last year I got the opportunity to have dinner with the steering committee of cf.Objective()
in the United States, and the topic of bringing cf.Objective() over the
Australia was brought up. I was instantly excited by the idea as I had
always had such a wonderful time at cf.Objective() in the US, and
had found it such a marvelous ColdFusion learning experience that I've
been back every year since, and am speaking again this year.
Apparently, I've now been given the title of 'cf.Objective() Vice Instigator - Pacific Operations ', for generally just being that annoying guy in the background going 'so what do we do next?', and harassing people on IM to make sure they show up for teleconferences.
Having
a stack of focused, ColdFusion specific, Enterprise software
development knowledge coming directly into Melbourne is going to be
great for local ColdFusion ecosystem, both for Melbourne, and also for
the Australia and New Zealand region.
Speaking from
experience, simply having a lot of smart minds that do enterprise
ColdFusion development, in the same place, at the same time, talking
ColdFusion, means that all sorts of interesting ideas and opportunities
get discussed, developed, and often worked on in the halls of the
conference.
The conference dates are the 12th and 13th of November, 2009.
We are still in the process of lining up sponsors and speakers, so if you are interested in either, please check out the website for more details and/or sign up for the mailing list, so you can be appraised of further developments.
If you are interested in coming to cf.Objective(ANZ), please sign up for the mailing list as well, so you can stay abreast of the latest and greatest news for the conference.
Oh, and the hotel is gorgeous, you should check out the online video!
I look forward to seeing you all there!
