Into The Box 2016 Recap

June 20, 2016

Into The Box 2016 wrapped up last Tuesday evening; this was my second Into The Box, both as a speaker and an attendee.  I like that this year’s conference was at the same venue as Dev.Objective, it made for fewer logistics among both the attendees and speakers; registration and sessions all ran smoothly, etc.  Lunch was on par with NCDevCon (I skipped breakfast and ate at the hotel), and of course there was the obligatory mariachi band and snacks at the reception. :)

If memory serves, there were a few minor changes from last year with regards to the session schedules.  2015 ITB was all 1-hour sessions split among 2 tracks. This year the first half of the day we had the standard 1-hour sessions, and the afternoon consisted of shorter 30-minute talks, affectionately termed “tech tastings”.  (Both are fine by me as an attendee; as a speaker, I only ask that it’s discussed in advance to make sure the content can fit in a shorter time period without removing too many details.)  So there was more content this year crammed into the same amount of time - 1 day, 2 tracks.

The content was a good mix of Box-specific things as well as other facets of development.  For instance, my talk “Best Practices are Best, Except When They're Not” is just a discussion about general software development stories (about half the examples are ColdFusion specific, but none are ColdBox/Ortus-specific).  There were also great talks on Ionic (see my notes about Scott Steinbeck’s Ionic preso), Vagrant, Couchbase/N1QL, FusionReactor, and AWS Lamda.  Rough guess, I think the conference is about 50/50 Ortus related and non-related content.  Many of the Ortus related talks are basically intros to the products (so you don’t need to be an expert in, say, CommandBox to get value out of that session).  Several of the Ortus-product-specific talks included a lot of “transitional content” — meaning if you’re familiar with a similar product (Framework-1, Mura CMS, etc), there’s not much of a learning curve and a big chunk of the content is  pretty easy to grasp even if it’s outside your “comfort zone”.

On that note, I wonder if people are aware that many of the Ortus products are “separate” things.  Does everyone know that most of them do NOT require using ColdBox to run? And you can mix/match many of them as needed?  My guess is many people still have the mindset that “all Ortus products need ColdBox to work”; that’s incorrect!  I’d encourage everyone to at least check out CommandBox or TestBox and play with them a bit.  (I’m giving my talk on Dependency Injection at ColdFusion Summit and I’m considering rewriting a chunk of it to include WireBox code samples.)

Session highlights for me: Scott Steinbeck's talk on Ionic was very well done (and well timed, as it gave me a chance to spot-check a few things in my Angular/Ionic deep-dive at Dev.Objective).  It helped clarify several points for me in the Ionic stack.  George Murphy's talk on Vagrant helped fill in some gaps for me on that topic as well, especially with regards to how it works with Windows virtual machines.  I also especially enjoyed Aaron Benton's talk on N1QL; this was probably the first no-sql related talk that got me genuinly *excited* about that technology!  There weren't any clunker sessions; 1 talk (I won't say which) I think may have benefited from having a couple more demos and being less abstract, but I can see how that would have been very difficult to coordinate given the topic. (My apologies for the vaguess;  I don't want to unintentionally bash someone here.)

Congrats to the Ortus team on another successful conference. Luis briefly mentioned next year’s ITB might be in Dallas Texas. Can we coordinate attending a Rangers game while everyone is there? :)

See everyone next year!

-nolan