Into The Box 2024 Recap

Into The Box 2024 was a couple of weeks ago. And while Into The Box has been a conference for many years now, this one will definitely go down as one of the more memorable years for the event.

New City and Venue

This year ITB moved from Houston to Washington DC. Instead of being held at a hotel, the conference was held at the Optica building. This venue worked fine -- we had all the spaces we needed, power outlets everywhere, good wifi, etc. As a speaker I would have liked our hotel to be a tad closer to the venue, but this wasn't a huge issue.

New BoxLang Platform

The biggest news of the conference was obviously BoxLang, a new platform (language, runtime, dev tools) that is both its own language and also a new CFML platform alongside Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee.

While I'd heard rumours that BoxLang was getting announced at ITB, South of Shasta wasn't part of the beta testing nor did we have any other involvement with it. So I wasn't 100% sure it was happening until Luis gave the keynote and dropped the news. But now that it's here, I expect lots of new developments over the coming months (to say the least).

No Clunker Presos

Every session I attended was well orchestrated, I saw no talks that made me question my choices. (Maybe 1 or 2 new speakers appeared a bit nervous, but the content was still pretty solid.) Many surprise sessions related to Box Lang got announced after the keynote, so my original agenda changed some (as I think it did for other attendees too). Everything got recorded so attendees can watch anything they missed later on.

My session ("How To Make a Living as a (ColdFusion) Freelancer?") went well enough. Not a ton of attendees in my room, but that was to be expected. I was competing with Gavin and while his talk wasn't directly about BoxLang, I think by this point in the conference, it was hard to compete with any Ortus related session (just in case it included another BoxLang related surprise).

My favorite preso of the conference was Noah Assi's talk on "How to Break Your App With Playwright Tests" -- his demos and code samples were excellent and really got the audience engaged and excited about trying Playwright.
I liked Noah's talk better than Eric's Playwright talk from last year. Don't tell Eric I said that. ;)

Next year's Into The Box has already been announced, as has a version of the conference happening in Spain. Definitely lots of things to be keeping an eye on over the coming months to say the least!

-nolan