CF Camp Wrap-Up

October 22, 2014

CF Camp 2014 is done. Overall I think it was a success for everyone. It was a very intense schedule, leaving CF Summit and immediately flying to Germany the very next morning (especially having to give presentations at both conferences). I've been a little under the weather most of the time I've been in Germany, probably mostly due to exhaustion (sleeping on a plane is never fun, nor comfortable). Much to my surprise, CF Camp had an on-site chiropractor giving free adjustments to the attendees! This was brilliant, and a huge help! She wan an excellent chiropractor, very friendly and American to boot (I was able to ask her a few things about German culture, to make sure I wasn't being rude accidentally to the locals).

All the presentations I saw were very well structured and delivered exactly what they claimed to. Feeling ill during most of Monday, I didn't take quite as many notes (nor chat with as many people) as I had intended, but still got quite a bit of value out of the sessions.

Highlights for me included...

CommandBox (Luis Majano) – Admittedly I haven't looked at all of the *Box projects as in-depth as others. I've used ColdBox for a client project before and enjoy it fine. I'd heard of CommandBox before but didn't investigate it closely. It's becoming a really impressive project! Even before Luis was done presenting, I was getting inspired, and thinking of several things I could use CommandBox for. I hope this takes off and gains popularity quickly among the ColdFusion community.

Multiply Like Rabbits (Markus Schneebeli) – I knew nothing about Message Queue servers before this talk. Nothing. Markus did an excellent job explaining what they do and how they work both in general and with Rabbit MQ (and via ColdFusion). He is an excellent presenter and very nice guy, I wish I had more time to talk with Markus at the conference.

Dependency Injection with DI/1 (Chris Schmitz) – I feel there's always been a lack of -good- quality "intro to dependency injection" talks in ColdFusion. For a long time most of them used the same "cflog example", which never really worked for me, nor did I feel the explained things in a way that was truly beneficial to new developers. Chris did a great job explaining the basics of DI and how to start using DI/1 to solve problems. He gave me a few ideas for how I can improve my own Dependency Injection presentation as well.

ECMAScript 6 (Matt Bourke) – Matt's talk was excellent. It was a massive amount of new information about what's coming in in the next version of ECMAScript / JavaScript (and also a few bits about ECMAScript 7) mixed in with a few bits of humour. His slides were clear and easy to understand, with concise and intuitive code samples for all of the topics he discussed. For the first time probably ever, I'm excited about new features coming in JavaScript. :)

Event Gateways (Gert Franz) – Thank you, Gert, for finally explaining Event Gateways in a way that made sense! This is one of the areas of ColdFusion that I've never bothered using, because (again, one of my biggest pet peeves) there hasn't been a good, clear, explanation as to why we should use them. Nothing had "clicked" for me, so I skipped this feature. Now they make sense, and I'm excited to try and use Event Gateways in an application.

Get Grulping With JavaScript Task Runners (Matt Gifford) – Matt's talks are always very enjoyable. He mixes tons of useful info with lots of humor and personality. This talk was no exception. Grunt has been on my "todo" list for a while now, and after Matt's talk I'm very excited to add it into one of my next projects.

It was a little disappointing that Adobe was a no-show. I'm unclear as to what the reasoning was for that, so I can't really place judgement or anything, but it would have been nice to see them with a presence at the conference.

Thank you again to all the European folks I met. Your hospitality was greatly appreciated. Perhaps I'll see some of you again at the WAIT Conference – I'm considering submitting a few presentations, hopefully something is selected. :)

Now to brave the weather and do some tourist things with my last day in Germany.

-nolan