cf.Objective(ANZ) Melbourne 2010 Review

cf.Objective(ANZ) was on a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne Australia. This was my third cf.Objective() event that I've spoken at and attended (two here in Australia and one in the US). I almost didn't make it due to an unschedule stop in Iceland but managed to catch my connecting flight with minutes to spare.

There was a wide range of sessions showing at cf.Objective(ANZ) covering new programming techniques, performance, security, frameworks and a lot more.

Connecting Flex and ColdFusion to Arduino Workshop

The first day I spent running my connecting Flex and ColdFusion to hardware course. Everyone had fun and by the end of the day were running web servers on Arduinos and talking to them from Flex and ColdFusion. We even managed to blow up a few LEDs, always a good way to learn how to not to do something.

Code Wars

That evening I went along to Code Wars (run by Robin Hilliard from Rocketboots) and got persuaded to take part. Our team managed to make it through to the final round even if I did have trouble on remembering how to draw circles in Flex. We also won a round with an Arduino running a simple (slightly buggy) game using a danger shield, but we missing out on decoding the fiendish cypher in the last round. I'll like to blame the jet lag, lateness and beer consumed for not winning but it was the better team that won on the night. Congratulations to Gert Franz and Mark Drew.

Code wars is good fun to attend and watch but think it would be better with shorter rounds and slightly easier questions, perhaps a quiz style round as well?

Conference

The venue was an improvement over last year, better location, better food, (and thankfully no construction work) and everything went very smoothly thanks to the organizing committee headed by Mark Mandel and Julie from The Full Pretzel.

Sessions

The conference session highlights were:
  • Indy Nagpal's session on CFWheels. Showed how it produces simple, beautiful and easy to understand code.
  • Mark Mandel's talk on Aspect Oriented Programming even though it made my brain hurt a little. Something I need to look further into.
  • Mike Brunt's detailed talk on caching in CF9 and ehCache which covered quite a few things I was totally unaware of.
  • Charlie Arehart's session on gems in ColdFusion Builder. Sorry CFEclipse but I think it's time to give CF Builder another go.
  • Tim Buntel's entertaining talk on what other than code makes for a successful project. No puppets this time but he did refactor one of his kids out of the talk.
  • Jaime Metcher's insightful and pragmatic talk on design patterns. If you just getting into design patterns or even if you have been using them for a while this was a must see.
  • Darren Tracey's talk on showing agile development in action.
  • Andrew Mercer's session on the FW/1 framework. A simple and very powerful framework, another framework I need to take a more detailed look at.

With two sessions running it sometime hard to get to see every talk you want so I missed out on some other great talks as well.

Thanks

Finally it was also great to have caught up with so many people I've not seen in recent times (living in Italy does have it's disadvantages).

Thanks again goes to Mark, the organising committee (which I was a member) and Julie for putting on a great conference. I'm looking forward to next years conference already and hope to see you there!

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