CF Summit East 2024 Recap

Last week was the 2024 edition of CF Summit East in Washington DC.  Formerly called the Adobe Government Summit, CF Summit East has changed venues a couple of times. This year it was at the Carahsoft building which worked quite well.  Wifi was stable, food was good, plenty of power strips in the rooms.  As a speaker I prefer when the hotel is also the conference venue so I can prep in my room before giving a talk, but aside from that I have no notes. Carahsoft and Adobe ran a really solid event.

The conference itself was technically 1 day, but there was also a pre-conference ColdFusion Certification Workshop that people could sign up for. Dave Ferguson and I were TA's for the class (Brian Sappey taught this session). And again, no issues. The new content we created for the ColdFusion Certification was also announced -- more on that later.

Session Highlights

Raymond Camden's talk on Web Components was great, as expected. He and I both have presos on Web Components that we're actively using; I always pick up something new from Raymond whenever he's presenting. This talk is no exception.  (Raymond's talk was pure Web Components, whereas the one I gave last year for CF Summit was combining Web Components with CFML, so some overlapping content, but lots of unique info as well.)

Charvi Dhoot from Adobe presented the "ColdFusion Roadmap" session, showing off many of the upcoming features we'll see in ACF.  Even if (some of) the features aren't things we'll need at South of Shasta soon, it's always good to see the overall direction of the product, and have an idea of what we can expect in the future. I had the pleasure of meeting Charvi last year at the CF Summit in Vegas (she was kind enough to loan me 5 minutes of her session to announce some upcoming South of Shasta projects for the community). This talk was the latest iteration of what we saw in Vegas -- some new feature announcements, and just overall a nicely updated presentation from her with several updates.

Luis Majano gave his "BattleField ORM" preso which I've seen 2 or 3 times now. Even if you don't use ORM libraries, there is a lot to learn from this talk. Forget the ORM specific pieces; you can still glean a lot of best practices about software design, OOP, and ways to organize your SQL layer. Seriously, even if you're not using ORM (SoS does not use it on many projects currently), this is still very worth your time.

Didn't get enough new info from this 1-day conference in DC? Into The Box has moved to DC and is happening May 15 - 17!  And the Adobe CF Summit in Las Vegas was just announced for Sept 30 - October 2. So many options! Now go learn something. :)

-nolan