Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

We are running a great little competition that with just a few lines of code (ok, 4K total file size) you can win a ticket to cf.Objective on April 22-24, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN! 

There are few rules to the competition, but basically just write some code that shows off Railo Open Source server's features.

Check out the rules and some ideas over at the Railo Blog!

 

 

In a couple of weeks, the German ColdFusion User Group is holding ColdFusion Camp 2008 in Munich. This is a great mini conference with some great sessions covering frameworks, tuning, PDF generation and Railo Extensions. All this for a mere €35 (£28, $45)! 

I shall be covering the ModelGlue and Reactor camps for the framework battle against Coldbox (a fight to the death!). Andy Allan will also be presenting as well as Gert Franz, Louis Mojano, Darren Pywell and Peter Haak covering Security Awareness.

Apart from the main conference itself, there will be a day of training sessions (priced separately) covering Advanced ColdFusion, ColdBox, Subversion and Railo. Gert and I shall even be building a YouTube clone in a session! Not to be missed! 

I think this will be the way ahead for a lot of conferences, as the organisers of "A Wee Dram" have mentioned, lower prices, shorter conferences, more locations. Get the power of ColdFusion out to the masses!

I just finished presenting my "Better living through configuration" presentation at A Wee Dram of Scotch in London. Its a great presentation so far with Adam Lehman and Claude from Adobe kicking off the proceedings and showing the (possible) Hibernate features in Centaur (or the "Eagerly Awaited next version of ColdFusion"). 

The rest of the day should be really interesting, and currently Peter Bell is telling us about RAD OO.

This is the smallest conference I have been to, and I think its great, there are only about 70 people in the same room and its only one day... a great way to really meet other developers (rather than the immense scale of other conferences)

If the wireless picks up, I shall try and post some more today, if not I shall give you a breakdown (after the hangover ) tomorrow!

In the meantime, here is my presentation and code for you to play with!

Coming up this Thursday 25th of September, the "a Wee Dram of Scotch" one day conference is taking place in London.

This is a great replacement to the cancelled CFDevCon that was meant to be happening over in Brighton, but alas didn't for various reasons. Which brings to mind whether we should have more conferences like this, one day, very cheap (at £10 for entry its surely the cheapest conference there is!) but with still some awesome speakers such as Sean Corfield, Peter Bell and Mike Brunt, not to mention Adam Lehman from Adobe doing the keynote!

So what do you think? Should there be more one day conferences? Would you like your CFUG to cover this instead? More cheap (or free) training in your locality?

Also, how would we expand the use of CF? Is this a good medium for this?

Would love to hear people's opinions on this.

During the CFUnited 2008 Conference in DC, most speakers were able to record their presentations onto Adobe Connect. This is a great feature for most presentation styles (of course not all, since you might want to have a discussion, rather than a presentation), rather than just filming the speaker. Here are the Adobe Connect presentations that have been posted so far:

• CFEclipse reloaded: http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p69604765/
• Coldspring: Better living through configuration http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p37989763/

You can see the other presentations posted here and here Let me know what you think!

What a blast was CFUnited this year! And indeed, I took *some* photos, but for some reason, people managed to take a few photos of me! If you managed to snap me (either in the Crime and Punishment museum or showing off tattoos in the sponsor corral) let me know!

Are you at CFUnited in Washington DC today? Do you have a (visible) Tattoo that you can show the world (without getting arrested)? Fancy being part of a photo? I am trying to get people in the community for a group photo showing our ink! If you are up for this, meet me at the front of the Integral stand after the Demo Derby today and I shall see if we can all get in on a massive group ink shot!

Its going round, like a bad cold, so I thought I would also chip in with my CFUnited 2008 meme! What are you looking forward to most? Meeting up with people from the community and hanging out in DC! Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera? Probably Peter Bell, that guy can write and talk like there is no tomorrow! What do you plan to do outside conference time? Well, I am looking for a tattoo place to get some stuff added to my arm, and then it will probably be a bar where the rock is loud and the beer is cold. Any suggestions from locals? I might also head up to Rockville to check out a record shop that Henry Rollins used to frequent. Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the ______ booth. "Beer" Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited? Yes, its part of my FreshAir presentation!

Next week, CFUnited DC gets on the way, and what a busy conference it will be! Having checked my schedule it looks like it will be a real marathon for me. Here is my schedule: Wed 1:30 - 2:30 : ColdSpring: Better living through configuration Wed 8:30pm - 9:30pm : Improving quality through code reviews and mentoring Thurs 9:30 - 10:30: Fresh Air: Getting to grips with Aptana and AIR applications Fri 9:45-10:45: CFEclipse Reloaded Fri 11:00 - 12:00: Jing Demo (5 mins) Fri 11:00 - 12:00: Railo Demo (10 mins) Sat 9:45-10:45: CFEclipse Reloaded Sat 2:45-3:45: ColdSpring: Better living through configuration You might ask what the Jing and Railo Demo's are about, well, you are just going to have to turn up and find out! :) Hope to see you all there!

Tomorrow I shall be heading to Edinburgh for the fantastic Scotch on the Rocks conference. I know Andy Allan has been working really hard to get this conference going and last year's event was a real blast! This year I shall be presenting a couple of topics, ColdSpring: Better Living through Configuration and a new topic which is FreshAIR: Developing Adobe AIR applications using Aptana Studio. This makes a change to my usual CFEclipse presentations and I have been working hard on making them both informative and entertaining (no, no juggling... sorry!) I am really looking forward to meeting some old friends as well as new ones! So come and say hello!