CFUnited Final Wrap-Up

First off, I apologize for not doing wrap-up posts for days 3 and 4. Those two days were pretty hectic with running from session to session and everything else I just didn't have the time to blog. So, I am doing a full summary now.

Day three was awesome, and there were some very good sessions. The best was Elliot Sprehn's "Internals of the CF Server". A lot of it was over my head but incredibly interesting and I learned a lot about how the CF server actually does it's magic. Even Ray Camden and Sean Corfield were blown away by this whiz kid.

Day four was also great, with two sessions by Hal Helms which were just fascinating. Hal is an incredible guy--I got to meet him afterward and he is just so nice. He is one smart cookie. His "Prototyping for Smarties" session was by far one of the best I attended all week.

Overall, the conference was well done once again. However, something did seem a bit "off" this time around. I'm not really able to put my finger on it, but something just wasn't right this year. Maybe it was the new venue/conference center, maybe it was the shift in some of the community members. I don't know. I heard attendance was down by at least 150 this year. I have to say, the walk from the hotel to the convention center started to get old after day 2. I missed the days of the Bethesda center where it was just a walk downstairs from the room to the conference. It reminded me way too much of past MAX conferences where we had to walk for what seemed like miles to get to the conference each morning--lugging a backpack with a laptop.

What I thought was really weird was I only saw Ben Forta for about an hour and barely saw Michael Smith at all. The true "lynch pins" of the CF community weren't really around. However, I did see a lot of Ray Camden, Mark Drew and Joe Rinehart. I also got to meet Ben Nadel who's blog I refer to all the time--awesome guy.

The other thing that was very different (but good to see) this year was the attendance of many noobs to CF. A lot of people were just starting to use it and had little to no experience with it whatsoever. I thought that was pretty cool--lots of new blood which might breathe some new life into the community. I got to meet a great guy named Mike who I will hopefully be lifelong friends with. He currently lives in Oregon and is one of the nicest people I've ever met.

In all, it was a great experience and I am glad I got to go. Conferences such as this are essential for anyone who cares about furthering their career or just bettering themselves as a developer. Thanks to the great people at Teratech (Michael and Liz) for continuing to do such a great job with such a monumental effort. Here's to hoping there are another ten years of CFUnited conferences!

See images from the trip on my Flickr site.