CFUnited 2009

Posted by Todd Rafferty on August 17, 2009

Preamble: As you're reading this, keep two things in mind, I'm hearing impaired and my ticket to CFUnited was sponsored by Railo Technologies.

I must say that I didn't expect CFUnited to be so bloodthirsty, but the quest for knowledge was too much for some people. ;) This year CFUnited was managed by Stellr and they did an excellent job. They took care of their people and everything ran pretty smoothly from my perspective. If I had to gripe, it'd be about the setup of the main conference room (the keynote area) and the paper schedule that you got was outdated due to too many last minute presentation/speaker changes.

Overall, with the exception of the main conference room, I had no issues hearing any of the sessions. They were well mic'ed and room speakers were appropriately placed. The hardest time I had hearing was: Adobe Keynote, Joe Reinhart's speech and the conference hallways between sessions. And, I should also mention the loudness at the bar and the Adobe pool party.

My focus at the conference was as much CFML Frameworks, java, air and object oriented discussions I could handle and even then, what I posted in the PDF wasn't what I actually attended. I skipped out on a couple of sessions because I lost interest or because I found another session I wanted to go to. There were 2 sessions I really wish I had gone to, but missed it to take a break or ended up hanging out at the Railo booth or went to another session instead. The two sessions I regret missing was Do more work in less time: Become an Automation Rock Star! presented by Marc Esher and Subversion for Smarties - Do More With Subversion presented by Cameron Childress.

The five speakers that I enjoyed the most: Aaron West, Andy Matthews, Luis Majano, Simon Free and Sean Corfield. They were very clear for me, very strong and confident speakers.

A lot of people had the misconception that I was working at the conference. I wasn't beholden to work at the conference at all as there was no stipulation of time that I had to put in or otherwise. I was at the Railo booth helping out because I wanted too. There were moments when Gert Franz was absolutely swamped at the booth and no one was around, so I jumped in and answered questions.

Bottom line, I had an awesome time meeting everyone and learning new stuff. If you are a CFML Developer and you had to pick a conference on the east coast, you cannot go wrong with CFUnited. As I mentioned to someone at the conference, I love CFUnited for all the ideas I've gotten and I hate CFUnited for all the ideas I've gotten and I'm behind already. You will walk away from CFUnited with new knowledge of CFML and armed with more ideas than you can possibly implement. My suggestion? Write them down somewhere. By the time you leave CFUnited, you should know what your next steps are, what you need to learn and more importantly, more contacts within the CFML Community than you can shake a stick at.

One of the reasons I started this blog up again was because of the people at CFUnited. You can't help but be inspired by everyone there. I'm very greatful for the opportunity to go especially considering that I have zero funds available to me at the moment due to getting ready for a wedding at the end of the year.

To everyone that I met at CFUnited, it was a great pleasure meeting all of you. To everyone that missed CFUnited, I expect to see you at CFUnited 2010 because I'm told that I better be going or else.