Bob's Blog - ColdFusion Tidbits - Conferences

Join me at RIA Unleashed in Boston to Learn about ColdFusion ORM

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:43:00 -0400

I am pleased and honoured to announce that I'll be teaching and speaking at RIA Unleashed in Boston in November. Organized by Brian Rinaldi (one of my heroes in the ColdFusion community), RIA Unleashed is a conference that I have wanted to attend in the past and I think this year's version is going to be stellar. The format is a bit different from other CF conferences that I have attended: it's a two day conference, with day one consisting of half-day hands-on workshops, and day two having standard one-hour sessions across multiple tracks. You can find more information about the half-day workshops and one-hour sessions at the RIA Unleashed site.

The conference runs from November 11-12, 2010, in Boston. You can register for just day one for $150, just day two for $50, or both days for the bargain price of $175, which includes lunch on both days and a party on Thursday night. Brian is also running a contest which will award three lucky winners with a two-day pass to the conference.

I'll be teaching a half-day workshop and presenting a session on, you guessed it, ColdFusion ORM. The day one workshop will be a hands-on introduction to ColdFusion ORM, designed to teach you the basics of working with this powerful new technology. My session on day two is called "What Your Mother Never Told You About ColdFusion ORM", and it covers advanced topics that you won't read about in the ColdFusion documentation. It will be a great follow up for folks who attend the half-day ORM workshop, and will also be valuable to anyone who's looked at ColdFusion ORM already.

I'm really looking forward to attending this conference, and I hope to see some of you there in November.

View the Presentations from the cf.Objective() Pecha Kucha BOF

Mon, 03 May 2010 09:10:00 -0400

If you weren't one of the lucky ones who were able to attend the cf.Objective() Pecha Kucha BOF in April of this year, you can still have a chance to see these nine fantastic presentations. The event turned out to be just as fun and interesting as I had hoped, which is entirely thanks to the hard work of the presenters. Fortunately Michael Canonigo recorded all but one of the presentations, and Anthony Israel-Davis managed to somehow magically record his own, so they are all available for viewing via YouTube.

I've created a YouTube playlist that you can watch to see the intro followed by all nine of the presentations, or, if you want to check them out one at a time they are each linked to their respective speaker below.

Thanks again to all of the speakers and all who attended. Hopefully this can become a regular event at cf.Objective() and even possibly at other conferences.

I'll Be Presenting at NCDevcon in May

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:12:00 -0400

I'm tickled pink to announce that I will be presenting a couple of sessions at the upcoming NCDevCon, dubbed North Carolina's Premier Web Conference, which is being held in beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina on May 22nd and 23rd. As I discussed in a previous post NCDevCon is being organized by the Triangle Area ColdFusion User's Group and is a sequel to the hugely successful and wildly talked about CFinNC.

I will be presenting two sessions:

Getting Started with ColdFusion ORM
Creating a Twitter / Google Maps Mashup with CF and Open Source Tools

The first session is one that I have presented before, but ColdFusion ORM is an important topic and therefore the committee considered it worth presenting again. The second session will be a fun one. In it I will demonstrate how I used a number of freely available open source tools to generate a Google Map showing the locations of all of my Twitter friends. This is a project that I built some time ago, and is currently available via my site. I'll be making some updates to it prior to the conference and my hope is that the session will illustrate two points:

There are pre-existing ColdFusion open source projects that can be used to fulfill many of your application's requirements.
It's very easy to create something cool using ColdFusion.

The conference itself is still chock full of ColdFusion, Flex and AIR goodness, but also includes a healthy dose of JavaScript, CSS and other web development topics. The schedule with a full list of sessions has been published, and it's top notch. I'm particularly pleased to see some folks whom I met last year presenting this year, including Daria Norris and Jim Leether. There will also be a number of hands-on ColdFusion sessions for beginners, so if you know someone who would benefit from a bit of a ColdFusion kick-start, send them down North Carolina way.

Registration is open, and, just like last year's CFinNC, it's absolutely free. I hope to see many of you there.

CFinNC is Dead. Long Live NCDevCon!

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:34:00 -0400

In October of last year I had the honour of speaking at CFinNC, a ColdFusion / Flex / AIR conference organized by the Triangle Area ColdFusion User's Group. It was an outstanding conference; well run, with informative sessions on timely topics, which is pretty amazing considering that it was absolutely free.

The mad geniuses behind CFinNC are throwing another conference this year, and this time it's called NCDevCon. It will be held May 22-23, 2010 on the Centennial Campus of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. This year's conference is planning on covering a wide variety of web development and design topics including ColdFusion, Flex and AIR, Javascript and CSS, and, just like last year, it's free as in beer.

Registration is already open, as is a Call For Presentations. I'm hoping to get a chance to speak again this year, but even if I don't I'll be there to partake in the learning and festivities. If it turns out to be anywhere near as good as CFinNC (and I'm sure it will), it will be a conference that you won't want to miss.

I'm Attending Day of Mobile in Chicago

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:15:00 -0400

I'm going to attend Day of Mobile in Chicago on March 6th. I learned about it from an iPhone development mailing list that I'm on and while the topic of mobile computing is an important one, I was most drawn to it when I noted that Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin would be one of the many speakers presenting.His topic, Dynamic Languages are the Future sounds particularly interesting to a me as a ColdFusion developer.

In addition Jay Freeman (saurik), the creator of Cydia, will be presenting the keynote and David Whatley, the author of some award-winning iPhone games will be presenting From Hobby To Business: Making Big Money in the iPhone App Store. Noted software craftsmanship and agile speakers Cory Foy and Jeff Norris (of ThoughtWorks) will be presenting as well.

Here's what the web site has to say about the conference:

Day of Mobile is an all day event for mobile developers and enthusiasts that will take place at IIT on March 6, 2010. The overall goal of the event is to better prepare both Chicago's application development community and companies with mobile initiatives for the upcoming mobile revolution. We will cover a myriad of different topics relative to mobile development and strategy such as platform SDKs, cross platform development, multimedia, CMS/SMS, mobile business models and many more. The event will begin with a breakfast at 8AM and conclude after a keynote speech and hackathon awards ceremony at 4PM. Throughout the day, there will be talks running concurrently with one another in two adjoining ballrooms.

So although the conference has absolutely nothing to do with ColdFusion, I think that it will be an excellent opportunity to learn some complementary skills and some new stuff to boot, and at $39.95 it's probably the deal of the year!

I'll be flying down from Toronto on the 5th and if anyone reading this is planning on going too I'd love to get together. Leave me a comment or send me an email.