ColdFusion Summit East 2023 Recap

The 2023 CF Summit East Conference wrapped up yesterday — it was a fun, albeit short, trip. I’m already on a flight back hope; sadly no time for tourist things on this trip (tho my sushi dinner with Minh Vo yesterday was fantastic so I’ll take that as a win).

If you’re on the east coast (or can get there), CF Summit East is always worth attending. It’s a 1-day event (with some additional pre-conference workshops the day before) and this year included 2 tracks of quality content on topics ranging from Cloud, to JavaScript libraries (Alpine.js and Web Components), to several AI related things.

Adobe (Mark Takata and Vivek Kumar specifically) of course gave a keynote to kick things off. The content was mostly about the upcoming version of ColdFusion, where things are headed, and so on. Much of the focus is of course on improving support for cloud environments and things of that nature — I haven’t heard of any OO language improvements coming in this version (yet).

Session highlights for me included…

Luis Majano gave a great talk about Alpine.js — my team and I have been using this for a few months now and love it. While I already knew a chunk of the content in this preso from my own work, it was good to hear Luis explain things in his own way, which connected a few dots, and gave me some ideas for future projects of my own. If you haven’t checked out Alpine.js yet, it’s well worth a look — all of our current projects are using either Alpine or Web Components (or both) for anything “fancy” in the UI that used to be done with jQuery (which is much heavier and often overkill for many web apps).

Pete Freitag went over the Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses and did a stellar job as always. One highlight from this talk is how many of the top 25 weaknesses straight up don’t matter to ColdFusion because it’s built on Java, which protects against them! The next time someone says “ColdFusion is insecure”, refer them to Pete’s slides. ;)

I attended talks from Mark Takata and Michael Hayes that both went over APIs and some of the latest AI services being offered that do a variety of tasks. Some AI things are more for entertainment purposes but the general message being given these days is obviously “AI is coming, find ways to use it to your advantage”. Many of these services make it really easy to start using, there really is no down side to exploring what’s happening with AI.

I think my talk on ”Web Components With CFML” went well; lots of questions from the audience which is always a good sign. One thing disappointed me though. At the beginning of my talk I told the audience that they needed to be familiar with APIs, Ajax, and JSON…at that point one person got up and left the room. Seriously? Those requirements were a deal-breaker for someone? In 2023? Unless the person only started writing software a few months ago, that is a bad sign.

All of the sessions sounded great, and I’m bummed to have missed anything this year. I don’t think anything was recorded; if you get a chance to catch a repeat of these talks somewhere, do it! I’m trying to coordinate having a couple of the speakers present at Sac Interactive later this year — more on that later. (And I’ll be giving my Web Components preso for the group later this month.)

After the conference Minh Vo and I went out to a long overdue sushi dinner. Didn’t have time to look around DC on this trip, but the convo and laughs with Minh were great so I’ll count it as a win. :)

So long, DC! It was a fun albeit short trip. See y’all in Houston next month for Into The Box!

-nolan