The Final CFUnited - Conference Review

This year’s CFUnited was unique in so many ways for me. Much of the conference was the same as last year: the venue at the Landsdown Resort, which offers great amenities (the gym and pools are fabulous) and good food; the speakers, most of whom were CFUnited regulars, were excellent; and the networking was incredible. Part of what made this year unique, however, was the fact that it was the final one.

A Unique Year
There was a sense of nostalgia tinged with disappointment in many aspects from the keynote in which Adam Lehman showed pictures from all year’s past and especially the goodbyes on the final day. The other aspect that made it unique for me in particular was the fact that Liz Frederick announced my new position with Adobe via Twitter and I was inundated with congratulations (thanks everyone!).

All in all, it was a great event. As an attendee there were some disappointments and frustrations that didn’t exist last year, but given that this is the final year, I don’t think there’s much value in rehashing them. Given the many challenges they faced (many of which I think they kept to themselves), I give Cara and Tara much deserved credit for the work they did.

What I Learned
In looking back at the conference, two sessions in particular stand out to me. Firstly, John Paul Ashenfelter’s session on NoSQL. I loved learning about the various options available and this, combined with the discussions by Terracotta about the ehCache engine built into ColdFusion 9, only confirmed to me that my applications are far too dependent on slow and complex SQL in many places where it isn’t necessary. For example, in my current position, we could easily be caching much of the user profile information (either using ehCache or hooking to something like CouchDB) as this information is often trivial and rarely changes but is slow and tedious to load.

The other session that impressed me was Greg Wilson’s talk covering his ChessJam online multiplayer game. While the code in this was interesting, his discussion of the technical and marketing challenges was especially engaging. It became clear that, when launching any sort of business, there are always immense technical and business challenges that will arise once your application is in the wild. The key is to remain flexible and adapt to things as they come along. I also found the particular challenges that an online multiplayer game faces fascinating, when players are dispersed around the world with varying quality of connections.

Looking Ahead
As you might expect, a lot of people were talking about who might pick up the mantle of CFUnited to keep it going. Obviously, cf.Objective() is still alive and kicking and not to be forgotten. Nontheless, I think the process of replacing CFUnited has already been happening - just not in the way many might be expecting. I see events like RIA Unleashed (Nov 11-12 in Boston), NCDevCon, BFlex/BFusion (Sept 11-12 in Bloomington), D2WC and others as having already begun the task of replacing CFUnited. Here why:

1. They are shorter, cheaper and more regionally accessible to many people. This makes them easier choices for employers (who may see 3 days of lost work plus $1,500 or more in total expenses as a hard pill to swallow in tough times).
2. They are not just about ColdFusion. CFUnited did a good job of adding in other topics, like Flex and AIR, over the past few years but it was still primarily a ColdFusion conference marketed to ColdFusion developers. As you can see simply by their  names, these conferences are making it a point to reach out to many differenct communities - not just ColdFusion. This is good for ColdFusion, putting CF in front of people who might normally never see it, and good for CF developers by broadening their horizons and their networks outside of their comfort zone.

So, your job, as the community is to make sure you get out and support those events! I hope to see you all again at one of them. Viva ColdFusion!

I have mixed feelings about missing CFUnited 2010 and the previous years. We all make choices on where to spend our precious funds. Some spend it on conferences and travel. Some spend it on local workshops, books, and other things. I had a hard time justifying the costs of the conference with other things that I am planning this year. Others who missed it may have had other reasons, but I am sure I would have enjoyed it if I had gone.

I agree with your two points on the local conferences. A three or four day conference with travel comes out to be a five or six day event. Add up all the travel, lodging, meals, and registration and I would have spent between $2,000 and $2,500 to attend CFUnited (not including the bar tab.) Local conferences are a fraction of this cost.

At NCDevCon, there was a definite choice to have a diverse selection of sessions as well as different speakers. I can't say that it is a direct replacement for a larger conference, but it cost me about $50 total (t-shirts) and no missed work days. (I helped at NCDevCon so I am biased.)

One other focus of NCDevCon that I don't remember seeing posted on CFUnited was a focus on the hands-on sessions of ColdFusion, Flex, AJAX and Mura. There are a significant number of people in those workshops that are now active developers that were not in the past.

I really wondered about how CFUnited could be a money losing venture. I was in another organization that had a national symposium, and it was the biggest money maker we had (i.e., it was the cash cow.) And, the cost was nowhere near what the registration was for CFUnited. I hope that someone will pick up the pieces and do something again. Maybe I will be able to attend a future event.

Nice summary, Brian. Really wish I could have been there this year. I've only managed to get to one CFUnited, back in 2006, and had a blast.

Huge congrats to you on the Adobe position. Sounds like a perfect fit for both you and Adobe, and I'm sure it will work out wonderfully.