MuraCon Wrap-up

October 03, 2013

MuraCon has wrapped up, and I'm in a hotel finishing up the last day of a little quasi-vacation trip, getting back into gear on client work and such. I've posted most of notes from the different presentations I attended. A few presos ended up being more of a conversation between the speaker and attendees; I found myself engaged in the conversation, rather than taking notes. (For instance, I really liked Eddie Ballisty's talk on using Git and Mura, but ended up only making 2 or 3 small notes to myself about a Git config idea, and the rest of the time I listened to the questions people were asking; so I don't have much to share from that talk.)

The weather in Kansas City was great -- mid 80's both days! The hotel staff were all incredibly nice, and that airport is incredibly efficient...probably because it's the size of a postage stamp. :) The hotel rooms were big, clean, very relaxing. Hotel Wifi was a little pricey, but that's to be expected at times (and I only needed it at night anyway). There are a ton of places to eat within a 1 or 2 block walk from the hotel. Everything from fancy local restaurants, to the standard chains (PF Changs, Zocolo, etc) to lower priced sandwich joints. I found a Firehouse Subs for lunch one day (a person favorite, that they don't have back home in Sacramento) and the staff were just as friendly here as they were at the hotel.

My plane landed at 8am on Monday. By the time got to the hotel and cleaned up, I'd missed the keynote, but was able to piece together at least some of what was discussed through other conversations. Mura 6.1 is released, it's got lots of new features...one of which is, they've removed ColdSpring and instead are using DI/1. I kind of expected this would happen at some point, but I'm surprised it occurred so quickly. What do we (as Mura users/developers) gain by having DI/1 in there instead of ColdSpring? MuraORM has also been added to 6.1, which could be just the "glue" one needs to build really complex plugins, while keeping the model layer (and integration with Mura) more simple than it might have been otherwise (I'm looking forward to spending some time researching this further).

Blue River has a philosophy that they mentioned several times at the conference: "we eat our own dog food". Meaning, every site they build for a client, is built with Mura. While in a hallway conversation with some people, I overheard "I can tell Blue River actually uses their own product...because it's always improving in ways that make sense, it improves regularly, quickly, and is very easy to use".

(Hey Adobe, do you hear that? Can you please explain why ALL the Adobe web properties aren't built with ColdFusion? I think that would go a LONG way for you, on a number of levels. But I digress...)

I was hoping to talk to the Railo guys, but I didn't run into any of them this week. Also...I'm still waiting patiently for SlatWall to give away some of those black ringer tshirts. :)

One recurring theme for me at the conference was seeing just how much it benefits all of us to have multiple forms of documentation for our projects. I went into several sessions thinking I knew how a facet of Mura worked, only to find out that there are 3 or 4 other ways to do the same thing. I'd been under the impression that there were only 2 ways to build Mura plugins -- either via Framework1 or via this really convoluted demo I saw a couple years ago (I don't honestly remember who gave the demo, but it turned me off from doing Mura plugins because his delivery was really confusing). I left the conference with a whole new outlook on what it takes to build Mura plugins...and an idea for 1 or 2 new ones I need to build!

(A pet peeve of mine is when we see the same talks, by the same presenters over and over again at the conferences. While I don't feel this way about MuraCon, I -do- feel that happens at other events a lot. While I understand that it's hard to find qualified speakers at times, it also benefits the community to have different people give different perspectives on a topic. Rather than having the same 1 or 2 guys give a talk on, say, security or ColdSpring, we'd really benefit from having other people give THEIR take on a subject. Sometimes it comes down to having the right person explain things in the right way...and there's no way to get that advantage if we don't change things up at the conferences sometimes.)

Some of the branding/communication on the MuraCon website could have been a tad clearer. There were mentions of "partnering with the D2W conference" but it stopped there. Did that mean we could attend sessions at BOTH conferences? With one ticket? I'm still not sure; that could have been made more clear (and might have boosted attendance too).

I ended up skipping the BoF lunch sessions. The first day I was too exhausted from no sleep (that red-eye flight wasn't very comfortable). The second day, I couldn't find anybody that had info on when/where/how we were meeting for lunch. So I just grabbed a burger by myself instead.

One of the signs for me that a conference was worth the time/money is when I leave feeling exciting, wanting to just go back to my desk and write code all night. And that's what I've been doing since leaving the conference. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some plugins to write!

-n