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Plane ticket, check. Hotel, check. Into The Box 2018 is this week. As I mentioned in “Five Things To Know About Into The Box 2018” that was my favorite CFML event of 2017, and the 2018 conference looks to be about the same.  As usual, with so much great content, I’m having a hard time deciding where to spend my time. A lot of it came down to info in the session descriptions — thank you to all the speakers that provide detailed info, making it easy to tell what I’ll learn from your sessions!

Into The Box 2018 is next week in Houston, TX! Are you coming? You really should!

MuraCon 2018 wrapped up last night. Did you miss it? Did you skip it because you don’t use Mura CMS? Big mistake! :)  As I  mentioned in “5 Things to Know About MuraCon 2018” most of the content was not Mura specific, and the entire conference was packed with great information.

This week is MuraCon 2018, right here in sunny Sacramento.  I’m not speaking this year but will be in attendance checking out everything that’s going on.  Last year the sessions were recorded, I’m hoping they are this year as well. There were some seriously difficult choices but this is my best guess as to where you’ll be able to find me:

Jason’s end-of-the-day keynote (did you know that was a thing?) was one of the best takeaways from JazzCon. His first-hand stories and experiences with being a workaholic, and the fallout that results was extremely easy to relate to, and struck a chord with many people in the audience, including myself. Whether you’re a software developer, marking rep, or in any other career that’s stressful and often comes with long, chaotic hours, you’ll get a lot of value from listening to what Jason has to say on this topic.

Goal:

3 things:
1. enable to be more effective w/ docs
2. enable you to hate writing documentation LESS (not fall in love with it necessarily)
3. use docs in a way that allows you to focus more on your code

I’m at the NOLA airport, waiting for my flight home. I’ve spent the last 2 days hearing great music, having stellar conversation after conversation with some truly awesome people, and actually learning a few things too.  JazzCon 2018 was well worth the trip!

We’re partnering with the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco again to offer a handful of training classes later this summer!  Over a few weekends this summer, you can a great introduction to modern full stack web development! Starting in May we’re teaching an intro to JavaScript, then SQL Scripting, and moving on to the buzzwords du jour: Node.js and Angular to round out the series.  The complete schedule is like so:

This week is JazzCon.Tech in lovely New Orleans!  I’m giving updated versions of my talks “FontAwesome: Never Build Icons Again” and “Crash Course in Ionic + AngularJS”.  Judging by the list of other sessions, the rest of the time I’ll be busy frantically typing as many notes as I can and trying to follow along — the list of sessions is truly impressive! Lots of great content covering a variety of current technologies.

The other day, I had a great conversation with Jason Long at Blue River about the upcoming MuraCon 2018.  Historically MuraCon has been the “conference for Mura CMS”.  I say “historically” because this year things are a bit different. If you’re expecting MuraCon to be just (or mostly) content for Mura CMS users, you’re in for a big surprise!  Yes there’s Mura content, obviously, but that’s not the only thing; heck, it’s not even the main thing! Need to learn Docker? There is almost an entire 1-day track worth of Docker content. Are you more of a marketing person and less of a developer? They’ve got you covered there too. Here are some other things you may not know about MuraCon 2018…

We're partnering with the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco to provide a 2-day on-site Intro To Programming With JavaScript class this spring.  Do you have some non-techie coworkers that have always wanted to learn basic programming? Know someone needing to shift careers and learn more about the web? This is an excellent starting point for any people in those positions.

It’s official, I’m speaking at Into The Box 2018!  This year I’ll be giving a new (for me) talk titled “Connecting Vue.js and CFML with ColdBox”.

Our SacInteractive user group is back! Technically it never went away. But we had a bad run of logistical problems (several speakers dropped off at the last minute, both my co-manager and I had health issues that delayed things too).  Last night we had a long meeting, set up a gameplan, and I’m proud to say we have several great presentations in store for 2018!

The ColdFusion Summit 2017 ended on Friday and as best I can tell it was a big success for everyone!  This year’s conference was held at The Mirage (a first for CF Summit).  Hotel staff were all very nice, everything I needed was available, no complaints from me.  (My personal favorite is still The Aria.) All the conference staff were very helpful, answered any questions I had, no major logistical issues, etc.  Everything was well labeled, easy to find.  The food was good - it was wide variety of otherwise pretty standard conference foods.  (Lots of vegan and vegetarian options that were well labeled, and my friends that had food allergies were well taken care of — thank you, Adobe!)

Plane ticket, check! Luggage, check! Hotel, check! Tomorrow I jump on a plane and head to Las Vegas for the ColdFusion Summit 2017!

The ColdFusion Summit is almost here!  This year I’m teaming up with Carl Von Stetten to teach the “Migrating Legacy Applications Into an MVC Framework” workshop.  This is part of the pre-conference all-day sessions that happen on Wednesday November 15.  Carl and I are building an all-day class to help bring legacy CFML applications into the 21st century.  Are you still stuck writing CFincludes? Been scared to try an MVC framework? Don’t have much experience with OOP but know you need to get started ASAP? This is the workshop for you.

NCDevCon 2017 wrapped up last week and was another great success! I know I’ve said this before, but NCDevCon really is a great not-to-miss conference!  The price, location, weekend schedule and amazing content all make it an obvious event to schedule every year.  2017 was no exception.

This really bums me out to post.  Due to various flight and travel issues making it very unsafe, I had to cancel my trip to Germany and I won’t be speaking at CFCamp this year. :( I’ve spoken at over 30 conferences and this is the first one I’ve had to cancel.