Tuesday 17 September 2013

CFCamp: what am I gonna go check out (on Sunday/Monday)

G'day:
So I'm off to CFCamp, thanks to Mike Hnat and the other sponsors who pitched in to get me over there (I've said it already, but I'll say it again, and I'm gonna keep saying it: you guys rock). But what am I gonna go see whilst I'm there?

CFCamp is being held on Oct 14-15 2013 (so not quite a month to go!), although there are also pre-conference sessions on Sun Oct 13 too. I'll be getting there on Saturday evening, landing in Munich about 8pm, so dunno whether I'll be doing much that evening, but we'll see. But anyway... the conference. For reference, the CFCamp schedule is here.

Sunday 13 October

CFML from scratch

I dunno what I'll do on Sunday. Mike's doing a presentation "CFML from scratch". I'm slightly intrigued as to what he'll cover here, as it promises a lot:

a whole day of how to start with CFML from the scratch. From the first "hello world" up to building complete applications (including components, cfscript, etc.).
I don't think I'm in the intended audience for this - I at least like to think I've got a reasonable handle on CFML already - but who knows. I'm interested to know the experience levels of the conference participants: I'm guessing there's a fair range of skill levels there if there's a "from scratch" session.

The JVM is your friend

Kai's doing a presentation "The JVM is your friend" which sounds fascinating, but it's also a paid-for thing, so I'm afraid it doesn't sound "€180 fascinating" (sorry Kai).

Update:
I've spoken to Kai, and the disconnect I had here is that this is not just a presentation, it's actually a proper training course (full details here). This justifies the pricing, in my opinion. I don't think that it's not simply a presentation is clear from the conference material though? Dunno.

Server management / tuning is something I only do when I have to, rather than something I'm particularly interested in. Then again I am in perhaps an enviable position of not having to do this sort of thing in my day job as "we have people for that". If I was doing self-management (as it were), this would be an essential course. If you're in this position at your work, and your employer is paying for you to attend the conference... it's probably worth the €180.

Introduction to Mura CMS

I dunno who's giving this presentation, but it might be quite interesting. I don't know Mura from a bar of soap, and don't have a huge interest (or need for) a CMS, but I'm sure they're doing some interesting CFML stuff, and it's always good to see what other people are doing. Especially in an "off the shelf" application, as the approach to coding needs to be slightly different than simply a website. Also, I user to work for a CMS vendor, and have written an awful lot of CMS code, so it would be interesting to see how other outfits go about things. The more I write about this, the more interesting to me it is really.

That said... it's also a weekend and I'll be in Germany. This might suggest "bier" and "wurst" might be a better thing to do. Or just to have a wander around Germering and explore a bit. I dunno what's in Germering to look at, that said!

Monday 14 October


So the conference starts in earnest. And at 8am! OK: better not have too much beer on Sunday evening. Rego is at 8am, and Mike will be having a word at 8:45am. So I'll be lurking around for that. And coffee.

9:15 - 10:30am - Keynote - Gert Franz

This'll be interesting: Gert always gives a good presentation. He (and the Railo guys) also know that at a dev conference people are not interested in being marketed to (pay attention, Adobe), so hopefully it'll be fairly tech-centric. Hopefully we get to see some of the things coming up in Railo [next].

10:40 - 11:35am - CFWheels - Andy Bellenie

I've not used CFWheels... I don't think I've even done the usual thing of downloading it, creating "G'day World" and then getting distracted by another shiny thing. I've tried to get into investigating frameworks for the sake of it, but I just don't find them interesting (in and of themselves), so I can't engage enough to spend time looking at them. This is lazy of me I know, but it can't be helped. So going to this presentation is exactly what I need: I'll be forced to learn some stuff about CFWheels. I might make a point of doing at least a top-level course on Ruby on Rails before hand, so I can compare the two (CFWheels claims to be inspired by RoR, and being RoR-a-like).

I don't know Andy, but he has a website: "Don't Panic Solutions" (I like the HGttG reference). Hopefully I'll be able to grab a pint with him at some stage.

Up against that is "eCommerce with Slatwall" with Marco Betschart. I'm sure this will be a presentation which a lot of people will get a lot out of. However I don't really deal with eCommerce stuff... well we've already got our implementation sorted out... so it's not so relevant for me. And the CFWheels prezzo is a better fit for me.

11:45am - 12:40pm - Ready? Bootstrap! Go! - Guust Nieuwenhuis

As the lead-in to the session description says:

Bootstrap (www.getbootstrap.com) is a sleek, intuitive, and powerful open source front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
Which is a sum-total of what I already know about Bootstrap. And I know I should know more. So this is encouragement for me to dip into it, and then get some polish from Guust from his presentation. I've googled-around, and there's a 101-level tutorial on tutsplus.com, which I might look into as a teaser). I dunno when I'll find time to do this, but I'll try!

At the same time as this is Kev McCabe presenting "Unit testing hands on". This will be an essential presentation for anyone who is not already doing unit testing, but I'm reasonably confident unit testing already, so this one won't be as useful to me as Guust's presentation.

13:30 - 14:25pm - Mangoblog - Birgit Pauli-Haack

I've been meaning to move this blog away from Blogspot and onto a CFML-based solution, and Mangoblog seemed like the best solution. This project has been parked due to lack of £££ to move my hosting from my freebie plan on CFMLDeveloper to a paid-for one. Plus in general I've always found other things to busy myself with on the weekend. So like with Andy & Guust's presentations... Birgit's one might be the kick in the... backside... that I need.

Alex is going to be annoyed that I'll be skipping his "Building websites on OpenCFML" presentation, but I can pick his brains at the pub afterwards ;-)

14:35 - 15:30pm - There's a time and a place... - about timezones, locales and other mysteries - Kai König

I do a bit of work on localised / internationalised stuff, as well as having to get the client and the server in different timezones agreeing on time-based processing. So this could have some handy content.

Sebastian's Firebug presentation would also be really good, but I can only go to one thing at a time!

16:00 - 16:55pm - Introduction to CoffeeScript (and using CoffeeScript with CF) - Marcin Szczepanski

I don't know much about CoffeeScript, and... TBH... I'm skeptical about its merit (I just don't like the idea of code writing code), but it's more a developer-souding presentation than Christine's "How to sell CFML" presentation. That said... I'm keen to best understand how to get more bums on seats in front of CFML, so it could be worthwhile. I am definitely undecided in this slot.

As I am approaching the concept of CoffeeScript with a negative (and uninformed) opinion, I think I should perhaps inform myself on that topic, and then (maybe) revise my opinion. Or at least have an informed opinion, whichever way I go.

17:05 - 18:00 - Multilingual sites are easier than you think! - Grant Shepert

Similarly to with Kai's presentation, I do a fair chunk of this stuff in my day job, so I'm keen to hear how Grant approaches it.

Markus Bokowsky is giving a presentation at the same time: "How-to video today: for web, mobile and in general". I can't even begin to work out what that's gonna be about, so it's not on my radar at present. But when more detail comes through, I'll re-assess.



That's it for the first day. I've become thirsty even thinking / writing about all that (and it's only 9am!), so after experiencing it all... I'll be ready for a beer or two.

I'm greatly looking forward to all this stuff! And I've got a bit of prep-work to do before hand.

I'll write up my thoughts on what I intend to see on the Tueday either later today, or tomorrow. I need to crack on with some work now.

--
Adam