Oh for the love of god: what did I do to myself? As I touched on yesterday - "CFSummit (Sunday): conference tips from a veteran" - I had a bit of a late "night" on Sunday, so Monday morning was a bit "emotionally fraught" (read: I had a hellish hangover).
So I missed the keynote completely, as I was still trying to remember how to dress myself, and locating coffee (fortunately I managed to work out the first on that list before heading out for the second). I have subsequently learned that I was "announced" (whatever that means) at this keynote... so I'm in a bit of trouble for not being here. Yikes.
Once I actually arrived, Rakshith was giving us the once over ColdFusion 12, which was much the same as the presentation given at CFCamp. I've already written up what I am able to about that, in other articles:
- ColdFusion 12: it goes to show you should raise feature requests
- ColdFusion 12: ordered/sorted structs
- ColdFusion 12: the long-awaited CLI
- ColdFusion 12: arrays now passed by reference
I was hoping for some new code-centric stuff, but there wasn't really.
I had a chuckle when I thought I saw a reference to "Cold Fusion" on one of his slides, but he assured me I was seeing things (or "I was drunk", as he put it ;-).
Next up was Kevin Schmidt going through doing REST with CFML ("Building APIs with ColdFusion") - this was the code-centric side of things: how to configure one's CFCs etc. It was a good presentation and Kevin is an engaging speaker, but I was really let down to see all the code being written in tags. I know I keep harping on about this, but the community (and Adobe!) need to lead the way here in downplaying CFML being about tags. Tags have their place, but not in heavy lifting code. We need to start directing eyes away from tags for everything.
I was feeling dire so I went back to my room to try to smother myself with a pillow. And kipped for a coupla hours. I'm annoyed I missed Elishia's ColdFusion 12 API Manager presentation. And lunch. But so be it.
At 2pm I decided to check out Dan Fredericks' "CFML Features for More Modern Coding" presentation. I loved this... it was a true, sleeves-rolled-up code-centric presentation, and I think Dan's picked a topic that represents the cutting edge of complexity in CFML: closures and member functions (well: member functions aren't complex, but it's a mind shift fro CFMLers maybe). Hopefully his slide deck goes public at some point, and I'll try to link to it. I hope people enjoyed it, and got something out of it.
I still felt pretty sick.
3:30pm rolled around, and I had to get up on stage. And smile and stuff. It was the "Adobe Panel Discussion Q&A Session". This was interesting, and - again - I hope the audience took something away from it - but I think I was out of place being on the panel. The questions were mostly directed at Adobe, and I could not really participate too much in answering them. I think the panel should have just been Adobe people. I was there to field questions on code and dev practices and that sort of thing, but this is not the direction the Q&A took. It was more one of these marketing-speak things that I have indicated disillusionment with in the past: I don't want to be marketed at at a dev conference.
There were a number of things I wanted to talk about, but wasn't given the opportunity to. Oh well.
I think next time there should be maybe a dual (or do I mean "duel"?) panel thing: Adobe vs Community, or something. Or just get Adobe bods up there representing business, marketing, and tech, and let us community members ask them questions. Dunno. And it would have been better if I was in the audience, not on the panel, I think. Still: it was fun, and I really appreciate Elishia & the rest of the Adobe people giving me this opportunity. It must have seemed like a bit of a risk getting someone like me up on stage. I think I acquitted myself adequately, and I only accidentally swore once. That I can recall.
After that I surrendered, eschewed the chance for free beer and talking to people, and went back to bed. At 5pm. I woke up briefly at 2:30am and considered going downstairs, but my next thought occurred at 5am when I awoke properly.
So it was a bit of a waste of a day for me. There were a bunch of people I really wanted to catch up with and chat with, especially to see if we could get a conversation going around Dan's talk, and possibly try to corner Rakshith, hand him a beer, and have a chat.
The best thing was that I did get to meet Anit! I hardly spoke to him, but at least I've pressed the flesh with Adobe's resident CFML super hero. And I got a photo with him (it's been posted on the Slack channel, but I don't have it myself)! Cool. I also met Aaron Neff, who is one of ColdFusion's other superheros... he's by far the best CF tester Adobe have on tap. But his name is not one most of us will be too familiar with.
I reckon from what I saw and heard from other people, it was a really successful first day, and I hope today is just as good. And hopefully I manage to last beyond late afternoon, today. :-S
Righto.
--
Adam
