CFCamp 2015 Recap

CFCamp 2015 ended last night; I'm currently on the ICE train, on my way to Frankfurt, and finally have a few minutes to type up my notes on the conference!

Overall I'd say CFCamp was a huge success, and a big improvement over last year. Not to say that last year was a poor conference in any way, but there were several noticeable upgrades this year!

Most of the speakers (I think) all stayed in the NH Hotel -- this was a huge upgrade from last year! It's a much newer, more modern hotel with better room service, a better view out the windows, and various other amenities that helped make the stay more enjoyable. Last year we had one shuttle in the morning from the hotel to the venue; so everyone had to be on timg, or risk getting left behind. This year we had shuttles every 30 minutes all day long, providing more flexibility. Breakfast at the hotel was great -- one of the largest hotel breakfast buffets I've seen yet. Staff were very quick to answer any questions and made the stay very enjoyable.

This year the conference was held at the MuniCon building, at Munich Airport, as opposed to last year when it was at a venue that took about an hour to reach by train. For those of us (like me) on long flights, the closer location was greatly appreciated.

Food at the conference was some of the best I've had at any event! We were provided breakfast and snacks all day long (not only at specific intervals ala several US conferences). Lunch was excellent both days! We had a variety of meat and veggie options and various desserts, all of which was high quality. Dinner was sponsored one night by Andrew Dixon's company (the name of which is escaping me at the moment), and was yet again the same high quality food. Thank you, Andrew! Wednesday and Friday nights most of us ate at AirBrau -- my only issue with them is the English translations on the menu were either incorrect (according to the Germans at my table) or were translated poorly and didn't sound very appealing. Still, I found good quality dinner both nights, complete with vegetables! (Last year I couldn't find any fruit or veggies anywhere.)

The Exhibit Booth area was split between two sections -- one right outside the conference rooms, and other further down the hall. Unfortunately I think this limited the amount of exposure for some booths. Personally, I wanted to talk to the Adobe and Fusion Reactor folks more, but didn't find myself down that end of the corridor very often. If there's any way to provide one, bigger, area for all the vendor booths next year, I think that'd help a lot.

Adobe did a keynote on Thursday, starting off with the same "ColdFusion 20th anniversary" message we've been hearing lately, then Rakshith shared a few of the new items going into ColdFusion 12. Some of the high level info was the same as what Elishia shared at NCDevCon; Rakshith had more specifics, including a look at the new API Manager and Code Security Analyzer (my clients still running legacy apps will really appreciate this)! I'm more interested in upgrading to version 12 than I was 11, but it will depend on my client needs -- I may recommend some people just stay on 10 or 11 to save money. There was also a brief mention of version 13 but no specifics yet. (I'll post my detailed notes from Rakshith's talk shortly.)

Thursday night was capped off with a CodeWar, as well as a sumo wrestling match between Brad and Chris. I'm certain pictures and video will surface soon, but it won't compare to being there in person. :)

Other highlights and things of note included ---

David Boyer's talk "Static Sites with node.js" was really informative. I've yet to be "sold" on using static site generators (mostly because I hate Jade templates -- I'm against white-space dependent code, it reminds me too much of COBOL) but David's talk was really good and might have convinced me to take another look at the technology.

Jorge Reyes from Ortus Solutions gave a great talk on how to properly value our services as developers, and how to correctly pick pricing that is fair to both us and the customers. Without really giving specific dollar amounts (which would vary anyway), Jorge provided a lot of great insight about how Ortus works with their customers. This is definitely a talk where the slide deck by itself won't help much -- the real gain came from talking to Jorge, the audience asking questions, and discussing things further with him and Luis (who was sitting in the front row). If Jorge gives this talk again, I'd highly recommend attending!

Gert and Michi gave a talk titled "The Tale of Performance and Memory" -- lots of great tips on which tags/functions perform differently in ACF vs. Lucee, and information about -why- there are performance differences in each. Great info all around!

The Lucee 5 keynote (on Friday) was massive! There is so much new in the Lucee ecosystem, not just in terms of features in the language, but the people involved, and various other high level changes as well. I'll post the notes I took shortly, but honestly it might be better to track down the Periscope recording of the session and watch the entire thing (I don't have the URL for the recording unfortunately, but I know it exists).

Matt Gifford's talk on API Management and Maria Khalusova's preso on doing effective code reviews were also highlights for me. Both of my talks were immediately after theirs; admittedly I was only half paying attention, mentally getting ready for my own sessions.

I think both of my talks went well enough. Updated slide decks for both of my talks are on the Presentations page. If anyone has questions, just drop me a line.

Thank you, CFCamp! Perhaps I'll see you again next year.

-Nolan