Dev.Objective() 2016 Recap

June 22, 2016

Wow things have been busy lately! Giving 3 lectures at 2 back-to-back conferences on the other side of the country will do that. :)

Dev.Objective() 2016 wrapped up last week.  This is the 2nd year with a wider topic base and less of a ColdFusion focus (tho CF was still covered).  As a result of the switch in focus, attendance levels were lower than previous years, but anyone reading the conference handout already knows that, and knows it was expected as well.  It takes time to make such a big change; Dev.Objective() is a well run machine and I’m sure the team already has ideas for how to continue improving.  There was a brief mention of the conference happening again next year; it’ll be good to see what continued changes happen.  Personally I hope the content is the same mix as this year: a good amount of ColdFusion as well as other related technologies.

Tim Cunningham’s keynote, “Renewing Our Spirit of Discovery“, was inspiring and a great way to get the conference started.  Coincidentally I was reading “Ready Player One” while on my flight to the conference, which matched the theme of vintage video games and 80’s computers quite nicely. :)

Session highlights:

Jessica Kennedy’s deep dive on build tools with Node + Gulp was hands down one of the best sessions for me.  Until now, Node has basically been “the thing I need to run to build Ionic apps” and not much else.  I’ve done a few exercises from books and such, but haven’t found any real way to use it in my development workflow.  Gulp was kind of the same — I saw a few presos on it that made sense but nothing with enough context to justify me changing my workflow and incorporating Gulp.  Jessica’s talk was exactly what I needed — the pace, content, and hands-on portions were perfect, and I left feeling much more interested in using both Node and Gulp more often in my development workflow.  I highly recommend checking out this preso if you’re in the same position I was.  (Fun fact: Jessica said her session was a last minute addition and she wrote the preso about a week and a half before the conference...it didn’t show in the least.)

I’ve already raved about the Lucee 5 Deep Dive in my notes, and on Twitter, and to various others.  While I’ve built a few web apps for clients on Railo / Lucee, I haven’t contributed back to the project before.  Lucee 5 is a big revamp, including huge improvements in contributing to the codebase.  I looked at trying to compile Railo in the past, and gave up pretty early in the process.  Granted, I haven’t actually done it yet, but as you can see in the video, it should be really easy to do now.  The process of submitting bugs and feature requests is super easy as well — make an Atlasssian account (which only requires a username and an email addy) and you’re all set.  It literally took me 2 minutes to make an account and submit an enhancement request — the process should ALWAYS be that easy, not just for select open source apps but for any piece of software!

(Speaking of CFML, where was Adobe?  Is Adobe not sponsoring Dev.Objective() any more because of the wider focus?  I hope that’s not the case, as many east coast people -- and there’s a big CF community in D.C. -- can’t attend ColdFusion Summit.  Most modern web/mobile development involves multiple technologies anyway; it’s good to engage other communities and see how we can all build together. But I digress.)

Ray Camden’s talk on JavaScript Tempting was also excellent, but we all knew it would be — Ray’s presos are always very well done.  I didn’t take many notes but that’s because I was busy looking over the various code samples in his talk and just forgot about writing anything down. :)

I wanted to take notes in more of the sessions, but during the first day of the conference I was busy with prep for my Angular/Ionic deep-dive (which I think went well though I haven’t seen the session evals yet).  And again a bit on day 2 for my HTML5 preso. Still, I was quite happy with most of the sessions I attended, and picked up lots of new tips on Node, Gulp, Vagrant, Visual Studio Code, Ionic and of course ColdFusion/Lucee/CFML.

Other great sessions: Pete Freitas - “Securing Legacy CFML”; Dan Wilson - “Learn The Quickest Way To Use Free And Open Source Tools To Build Native Mobile Applications”; Scott Addie  - “Intro To JavaScript Tooling In Visual Studio Code”.

...and of course all the sessions where I took notes (posted in previous blog entries) were engaging enough to keep my attention the entire time and worth watching.

There were a few others I wanted to attend, but had to many schedule conflicts.  If I had to make one critique of Dev.Objective() that would be it — recording the sessions would be a great addition. If the recordings have to be available to just paid attendees, so be it, but either way I’d love a chance to watch the sessions I missed.

Congrats to the Dev.Objective() team for another successful event — see you in 2017!

-nolan