ColdFusion Summit 2018 Recap, Part 2

In the earlier post, we covered our adventures with the pre-conference workshop and highlights from the keynote.  Tuesday and Wednesday were the traditional 1-hour sessions. 

Giancarlo Gomez’s talk on websockets could have won an award for the largest number of demos ever crammed into a 1-hour session. Both in terms of quality and quantity, there was a mammoth amount of content to absorb from this talk.  If anything, it may have had a bit -too- much content!  Giancarlo mixed both fun demos (i.e. the Simon Says game he played with a member of the audience) as well as business app examples of how to use websockets in things such as dashboard applications.  (I had a conversation with Giancarlo about splitting the talk into a “beginner” and “advanced” version so more time can be spent on the concepts, which would be an excellent idea for upcoming conferences.)

Rakshith Naresh and Shirak Avakian gave talks around new language features in CFML. Rakshith’s talk was a general session covering many new features in CFML (array slicing, member functions, futures, etc) whereas Shirak’s talk focused solely on the the different ways of doing asynchronous programming (mostly via the runAsnc() method with a few notes about CFthread).  Both talks were well done and provided a great look at ways to use these features in various applications.

Brian Klaas gave yet another stellar talk about Amazon Web Services. I’ve seen Brian give several presentations on aspects of AWS and he never ceases to amaze me.  His demos are always great (this one included translating content from one language to another and generating audio/text from different source material), the code and slides are always easy to follow as well. I’m never more motivated about using AWS than I am when I leave one of Brian’s sessions.

Tuesday night’s networking event was a poolside party with an island theme.  A large crowd of conference attendees mingled outside eating snacks and sipping drinks.  Admittedly I didn’t stay very long and went to grab dinner with some friends at Nobu, one of several excellent food options in the hotel.

I skipped the morning sessions on Wednesday to look over notes for my talk “Real World Scenarios for modern CFML”.  Overall the talk seemed to go well enough. I ran thru a couple of examples quicker than I meant to and had some extra time, which was filled with questions from the audience, so that all worked out just fine. Thanks to everyone for the followup questions during this session I’ve now got updates already planned so there will be more content (and a slightly different demo) the next time I give this preso.

Wednesday afternoon ended up being filled with some other last minute meetings so I only ducked in and out of a couple of sessions, unable to give them my full attention.  I caught the last half of Dave Ferguson’s “SQL, learned all I need to know in 10 minutes” and picked up a few good tips from there (Dave always does a great job, especially going over various aspects of SQL and database server issues).  I also managed to catch most of Bouton Jones talking about accessibility, and the last few minutes of Andrew Skaggs and company discussing their experiences with building a SaaS platform on ColdFusion.  

Most every session this year was geared toward showing modern CFML, perhaps more than I’ve seen at CF Summit in previous years. Obviously this being a release year helped - there was organically more “new stuff” available to show off.  But that combined with the large number of attendees gave the conference a very positive vibe, showing that CFML can truly be used for modern web development.  There are no excuses: an app built in 2018 with a CFML stack can go head to head with any competing technology. It was great to see this as the underlying message in so many of the sessions and conversations throughout the conference.

Next year’s CF Summit was announced, but just loosely. “See you next year” is about all that’s been discussed thus far — the exact venue (and date?) is still being determined.  My impression is that everyone left the conference this year feeling very charged up and motivated about ColdFusion, and with strong motivation that it is indeed a modern development language. Personally I’m looking forward to the new language constructs in CF2018 and hoping to find placed to use them in upcoming projects.

See you next year!

-nolan