cf.Objective() 2008 Recap

Seriously worth every minute and every penny.

Jared, Steven and the rest of the gang involved in orchestrating this event should be proud of producing an event that is still of amazingly high quality. No lie: absolutely the BEST ColdFusion conference I have ever attended, one that is aimed squarely at the developers trying to solve the big hairy problems of enterprise-level software development.

I had a conversation with Steven Hauer this morning and narrowly avoided telling him the conference would still be as valuable at twice the price. $500 got me in to a bunch of sessions that made me a better developer. All told, for under $2000 (travel, registration, hotel, food/bar tab, misc) I improved my knowledge of tools and techniques that will ultimately raise the value of the work I do. A great investment for sure.

I'm sure there will be a bunch of these recap posts going up if they haven't already, so here's my 2c on what rocked and what wasn't quite as awesome. Maybe the community will come to some agreement on these, maybe not. Either way, there's not much that they should change about this conference - the formula works and works well.

Great things about cf.Objective() 2008:

• Content & Speakers: The strongest aspect of this whole event. I learn a LOT at cf.O() - a lot of stuff that I started poking at on Sunday and will work with this week. Effective!
• Attendees: A veritable "who's who" of the CF world. If they blog, they're likely to be in the crowd which is also just the right size. An overwhelmingly friendly bunch that is coincidentally lots of fun to hang out with and learn from.
• Power: Power outlets at most of the tables in the meeting rooms. Nice touch and a great acknowledgment that we're gonna be on our machines anyway.
• Twitter: Goofy little tool becomes the backchannel of choice. Had more thoughts exchanged via that than blogs, which I barely looked at at all this weekend.

Not quite as great:

• Wireless: Yeah, I'm sure you saw a few comments about the speed of the wireless network. Day 1 was so sluggish hopping on the VPN to deal with an issue was impossible. Got MUCH better on Saturday, however...not sure what changed or if half the attendees just gave up.
• Food: The food at Sofitel was great; the food at the Crowne Plaza just didn't measure up to that really high standard. Not a deal breaker, just not fantastic.

I did not attend any of the BOF sessions on Saturday night (except for the Bar BOF that closed the place down), but I do understand they ran really late. Will look forward to more of those recaps as well. Seems like the Open BD one excited more than a few people!

Hope to see folks at WebManiacs in a few weeks!