My First cf.objective()

I know I'm late to the "cf.objective() recap" party, but I've been both crazy busy and rather tired, so I haven't got to it until now.

First, I'd never been to Minneapolis before, and from the little I saw, it's a pretty nice place.  Obviously I missed the "buried under snow" part, and that definitely puts a damper it as a potential home, but I liked it.  Very walkable, clean, and aside from the second-story causeways between the buildings, a nice asthetic overall.  The hotel was in a great spot, with a pretty varied selection of dining an drinking establishments within easy walking distance.

Before I got there, I hadn't quite internalized how small a 200-person conference actually is.  "Social" is a skill I didn't inherit from my father, unfortunately, but with the number of people I knew already, I didn't feel nearly as isolated as I often do at CFUNITED (which is five times the size).

The sessions were pretty good, over all.  I didn't get to go to several that I would have liked to because of scheduling, but c'est la vie.  Here's a rundown of the notable ones I attended:

Adobe's keynote the first day was interesting, and I might be mixing it in with some other Adobe presentations, but quite fascinating to see crowd reaction to certain Centaur features.  CFFINALLY and CFCONTINUE?  Nothing.  It should be noted that I was the only one to applaud them last year at CFUNITED.  Remote diff of server configuration?  Huge applause.  WTF?!?  Script your production environments, people.  If they're ever out of sync, you're doing your job wrong.   ORM stuff got much applause, of course, and rightfully so.  Drag and drop, full-stack scaffolding also did.  Do people actually use that?  Great marketing/sales tool, no question, but for actual applications?!?!  But I digress…

Marc Escher's talk on unit testing was quite interesting, I thought.  I've tried numerous times, with numerous technologies, to really embrace unit testing and failed every time.  Actually had the best luck doing it with Flex, which just drips with irony.  I'm not predicting success next time I attempt it, but I'm confident I'll do better than last time.  On a similar vein, Sean Corfield's talk on cf.spec provided some nice pointers.  I'm not too sure about the "readable" spec document concept, but an interesting technique.  Until you can have exactly one spec document, I'm not sure of the utility, but I think that's really an editor/syntax problem, not a conceptual one.

Mark Mandel's intro to Transfer was quite interesting as well.  That I attended might surprise you if you're familiar with the various Hibernate projects I've worked on, but ORM is still voodoo in my mind.  Coming back to the basics and being "introduced" to ORM from the ground up is always interesting, because the subtleties in interpretation provide a great introspective of ORM as a whole.  The odds of me picking up Transfer and using it on a "real" project are pretty small, but I didn't go to learn about Transfer in particular, more about ORM in general.

Let me be clear on this, Transfer is amazing.  It does things with CFML that I would have sworn were impossible, and does them fast enough to be perfectly servicable.  It's just not the tool that fits my style.  I've been a Hibernate user for many years, and that's a hard framework to supercede.  Honestly, I bet I'll never replace Hibernate with another ORM solution, but instead replace it with an alternate approach (an object database, for example).

As you might expect, I also went to Adobe's talks about the new ORM functionality coming in Centaur.  When I first was exposed to their Hibernate implementation, I was pretty skeptical.  There seemed to be a global misunderstanding of both the technology and the problem it was design to solve, but that has turned around 180 degrees, and Centaur looks to have pretty robust ORM capabilities.  I've got a major bone to pick with how Adobe is marketing the functionality, but the actual implementation looks pretty sound.  It's hard to get a complete picture with the pre-release secrecy, but I'm a lot more excited about it than I was 6 months ago.

Even more exciting is what will hopefully be coming out of Railo/JBoss in the coming months.  There's been no formal talk of what that looks like yet, and it's probably a safe bet that it'll be similar to ColdFusion's implementation (for obvious reasons), but with Railo and Hibernate both under the JBoss umbrella, I think there's some cool stuff on the way.  Obviously any speculation is just that, but with Railo supplanting ColdFusion in a lot of places I use CFML, I'm understandably excited about it.

The last session was Adam Haskell's talk on mentoring and code review.  That is a misnomer of a title, if you ask me, because while he did talk about that stuff, the point was really about team dynamics.  Working on a team is hard.  Working in a "get things done" environment only makes it worse.  Fostering the team, particularly around helping junior developers move up in the world, takes time and effort, but it's worth it.  I think Adam did a good job of emphasising that any sort of formal process is less effective than an equivalent informal process.  Informal is inherently more personal, and with the typically sterile world of technology and computers, the "personal" stuff is really important.

Of course, the big draw of any conference (though the hardest to justify) is the meals/drinks/etc. that happen outside the actual conference.  (It seems like I just said the same thing two sentences in a row, completely by accident.)  With the conference as small as it was, the informal socialization was a lot tighter, I though.  Far less spreading of groups, and so more churn within them.

I also really liked the way they did lunch, with actual table service, rather than a buffet.  With a more formal meal, you end up sitting and talking with fewer people, but for a longer period of time.  Aside from fostering more involved conversation, it also provides a nice break from the chaos to resettle for the afternoon.

Talking with other developers is always fun, and typically the source of the best tidbits of information.  I always like learning about stuff, even if it has no direct applicability, because it gets you mind thinking in ways it otherwise wouldn't.  And it seems to happen pretty often that 6 months down the road one of those random bits of information suddenly because fairly relevant.  Maybe not directly, but at least opens my eyes to some potential approach I wouldn't have otherwise considered.

Great conference, overall.  I gotta hand it to Jared and his team.