NCDevCon 2016 Recap

September 19, 2016

At the airport to head home from NCDevCon 2016.  Yet again Dan Wilson and his crew put together a great event.  Each year I tell people NCDevCon is one of the best conferences to attend (especially for the price) and it never disappoints.

The keynote was given by Elishia Dvorak at Adobe, and was more of a general “here’s where the server space is headed” talk than a ColdFusion-specific talk which people may have expected.  She discussed trends in APIs, containerization, trends in real time data exchange and so on.  ColdFusion was mostly mentioned in those contexts and how the new API Management can help in that space.  There was also a brief mention of the upcoming ColdFusion roadmap (support is currently scheduled beyond 2031 with several new releases of ColdFusion currently on the horizon) as well as the ColdFusion Summit in Las Vegas next month (shameless plug: I’ll be giving a talk there on Dependency Injection).

I gave 2 talks at NCDevCon this year: “MVC With And Without a Framework” and “Git Source Control: For The Rest Of Us”.  Both ran about a minute over time, so the recordings may have cut off (sorry folks) but otherwise I think they went well.  Both of my talks are introductions, nothing fancy or cutting edge, yet both had packed rooms.  Clearly there is still a need to teach people about how to write modern ColdFusion, lots of people are still writing the “5-tag CFInclude” style code.  The good news is, I had a packed room full of people trying to change that!  

At the beginning of my “Git Source Control” talk I polled the room to see how many people had never used source control before, and it was a smaller percentage of hands than I expected. Typically when I ask that question at least half the hands go up; this time it was less (maybe 30%).  Based on the questions I got asked, at the end I think many people were using source control but were either just barely getting into it or they were stuck on something older (Subversion) and looking to see how Git compares so they can start migrating over.

I didn’t make it to every session that I had hoped to attend.  There were several schedule conflicts, not just during the timeslots when I was speaking, but also so many great sessions, it was just hard to choose. Add to that, after each of my sessions I ended up out in the hallway answering various questions for people and getting into followup discussions.  It’s reasons like this that make me happy that NCDevCon records all the sessions! Though I can’t always be in the room to support the other presenters, at least I can watch later and take in the content. (And I'm glad people had so many questions after my presentations -- I'm always happy to answer as much as I can.)

My favorite presentation was Aaron Ladage’s talk “Kicking Sass: How to Write CSS (and JS) in a PostCSS World”.  Aaron discussed several client-side technologies (Sass, Less, Grunt, PostCSS, CSS3, JavaScript ES6, various others) and were they all fit in the current front-end space.  While I’ve used (or at least looked at) many of the tools he discussed, Aaron’s talk really shed a lot of light on the short and long term problems and solutions of each of them -- it was a great explanation of where all the current CSS processing tools fit into development at a semi-high level.  I’m now rethinking several pieces of my current workflow and am more excited about preprocessing and postprocessing than I was previously.

Another favorite was Trevor Brindle’s talk on using Vagrant to standardize iIO/Android build machines. He really showed a lot of great ways Vagrant can be used beyond what I’m currently doing with it (using it for various server configs to test back-end code).  Trevor always does a great job presenting; this was no exception.  He’s a great resource for teaching mobile development practices.

I didn’t make it to any ColdFusion talks (other than my own) mostly due to scheduling issues.  My plan is to catch those (plus more!) at the ColdFusion Summit next month.

Speaking of ColdFusion, several people asked me who the good CF bloggers are nowadays.  Since many of the “usual suspects” are no longer doing CF, there is a shortage of people blogging about new features in CF, providing examples, solving problems, etc.   There is of course StackOverflow, Slack, and the like for answering questions, but there are drawbacks specific to those mediums that (IMHO) that don’t happen with blog posts (whether or not people can comment on the posts).  I’m going to try and take that question as motivation and be better about blogging myself; hopefully others do the same.

Since all the sessions at NCDevCon get recorded, I didn’t take any notes this time. I’m sure the videos will be shared soon enough.  

Thanks again to NCDevCon and congrats to the team on another successful conference!

-nolan