Commingled with the fun and excitement of attending this year's CFUNITED conference was an acknowledged sadness associated with knowing it was to be the last. We've grown accustomed to seeing each other once a year (for some not often enough, for others...just the right amount) and the loss of an opportunity to reconnect is a moment we should recognize and appreciate.

Many of us can say a lot of the same things about CFUNITED: we've seen great and not-so-great presentations, enjoyed great and not-so-great food, partied into the wee hours racking up bar tabs that were impressive or simply outrageous, and met the people that we call our community. Or more accurately: our friends.

A community without a place to commune isn't complete, and simply doing it on the internet isn't enough. Michael Smith and the TeraTech/Stellr team identified the need for a physical place for our rabid online community to gather outside of DevCon/MAX and user group meetings. The creation of CFUN and subsequent evolution (and growth) into CFUNITED gave us just that place. CFUNITED became one of those few gatherings that was both technically *and* socially valuable to the full spectrum of ColdFusion developers. CFUNITED also helped other members of the community identify the things they wanted in a conference, implicitly leading to the creation of cf.Objective to cater to the advanced CF crowd with many others to follow suit in their own way. All of these things added credibility and value to our community as a whole.

It is for those reasons CFUNITED will always represent a special place and time for us all. This conference turned newbies into real developers, the fortuitous hallway/bar conversations turned intermediate developers into professionals, and creative topic selections turned quiet cube monkeys into amazing speakers and teachers. Simply being together made us all feel a little less weird for being so enthusiastic about what ColdFusion enables us to do.

So as we move ahead without another CFUNITED on the calendar, I hope we all remember that the community is more important than any one event, that none of these things that we appreciate would be here without our continued passion and participation, and that it's important for us to support the things we have and the things to come. Doug Boude said it best: "now that one of the larger trees in the forest has sadly fallen, the vacancy it leaves us with is the opportunity and catalyst to allow for the currently smaller, more focused, and/or regional conferences to flourish and fill this niche."

NCDevCon, BFusion/BFlex, cf.Objective, RIA Unleashed, D2WC, and tons of user group meetings (online and in person) happen every single year. MAX will always be there with the extremely promising CF Unconference component. Out of the collective will of the ColdFusion community new events will emerge, and as they do we'll find our new normal. We've inherited a great gift: a passionate community and proof that there is significant interest in conferences at all skill levels.

This is a fond farewell and thank you to CFUNITED for what its creation and ending have done for our community. Thank you, everyone, who ever attended and made my CFUNITED experience better as both an attendee and speaker. I look forward to the day we're all in the same place again.

Two years ago I blogged about having attended a conference completely outside the 'geek crowd' and how much of an eye-opening experience it was. Since then, not only have the marketers' forecasts become reality (Twitter going big and them taking advantage of it) but I've also been fortunate to attend Higher Ed Camp Philly.

Higher Ed Philly was a great experience. I was really surprised at the great blend of technical folks and educators (from both public schools and universities) in attendance. The effect this had on the sessions was tremendous and has completely changed what I want to get out of attending a conference. In short, it was nothing like what I expected...it was way better!

From the perspective of a tech person who generally attends tech conferences, the interaction among the attendees was totally different. Instead of constant hardcore technical discussion, there was a balance of talk about tools and practical application. The educators' minds worked quite differently from ours but in a really valuable, interesting way. I found myself wanting to attend more of the educator-focused sessions simply to further understand their way of looking at the things we create as the starting point for their work to take off.

Consider this: we create, sometimes in a vacuum, but always with limited feedback. The educator must somehow translate the practical utility of whatever it is we created into something that the average human can understand and then apply to their own want or need. Their entire job is to act as our forgotten intermediary; a good number of them spend most of their time trying to keep other teachers up to speed on what's possible. Their (presumptive) reason for attending was to get a head start on that process.

Every session I attended included elements of show and tell, the educators talking about what they see as useful, and the techies trying to offer suggestions on the spot. We live to solve problems, and the challenges put forward by our fellow attendees were some of the most creative, interesting ones I got to think about all week. I think that's awesome and should stand as a strong message to all of us that we have to get out of our niche and spend more conference (unguarded, relaxed, non-work) time in a similarly blended community.

I bet we could have taught some of those teachers and instructional technology people at Higher Ed Philly a couple lines of CFML and made them dangerously powerful. I bet they could teach us a few things about how to understand methods of learning and made us dangerously effective communicators and trainers. Together we were kicking around ideas that wouldn't have naturally evolved from either camp alone and improved ourselves in ways we never expected.

...

Later today, the final CFUNITED conference will get underway. I'll miss it for all of the reasons that the attendees from any year share. But in retrospect, and through the lens of this new outlook on conference participation, I realize that the best learning I ever did there was from the informal chatter of people talking about their challenges, their daily realities, in a group of people we'd all like to consider colleagues. We talk about problems that are technical (solvable) and political (not always). We bring differing skills but a common understanding of CFML to the table and have a great time learning from one another.

CFUNITED has served us well as the table around which we gather, but tables also make us focus inward. In its absence next year, I hope to see the regional events (like CF.Objective, RIA Unleashed, NCDevCon and BFlex/BFusion to name a few) continue their excellent growth right alongside unconferences and meetups that blend our technical proficiency with people from other disciplines in the same space. We can't lock ourselves up in our own tech-specific shows all the time and expect to grow our community and grow our skills in a career-savvy way. The ColdFusion community, while awesome, will need to look outside the realm of those who work with competing technologies and instead turn towards people with complementary skills and interests to evangelize CFML as a platform.

Use the end of CFUNITED as a reason to expand your participation in new directions. Show off what your CF skills can do while scratching someone else's itch. And once you've done it, come back and share with everyone else. It's a big world, and we're all students of everyone else.

See you in Virginia!

I'll be presenting in two sessions at the upcoming WebManiacs 2008 conference in Washington. D.C.

WebManiacs 2008 will be held May 19-23. I've been asked to present on Yahoo UI controls (and other assorted goodness) and Salesforce integration (ColdFusion and Flex). These will be all new talks. as both topics have changed considerably in the last year.

The YUI talk will focus on the components as well as some of the supporting tools that make cross-browser development far less of a chore (their 'reset' script alone is a godsend). Plenty to cover there. but we'll also get in to the "how" of integration so you can get started quickly.

Salesforce continues its romp through the CRM marketplace. pushing harder into the application marketplace by constantly updating and upgrading their integration platform. My presentation at cf.Objective() last year was aimed exclusively at Flex. This year we're going to hit on integration with ColdFusion primarily. as that would be a more natural entry point for many developers. Lots to talk about. undoubtedly leaving you (the attendee) full of ideas for using a blend of someone else's hard work (Salesforce) and your own genius (you CF guru. you!) to make yourself fantastically wealthy. Or at least able to pay the mortgage.

So make your plans to visit DC in May. Then go back a month later for CFUNITED!

SOON

They've hedged their bets on this topic quite a bit (many vague references at cfObjective). but the lid is off now...

Ben is going through a few key features and functions while plotting the requests/second that CF6. CF7 and CF8 have been showing.

In just about every case. CF8 is more than twice as fast as CF7!

(edit) They also beat up on blogCFC and the adobe.com store - both showed at least a 30% improvement in throughput. So. under controlled testing conditions. it's much much faster!

Happy to be back in Rockville for CFUNITED 2007. for those of you who have been here in the past but didn't manage to escape work this year. there are a couple minor observations already:

• The online services for attendees are better than they've ever been - ajax-ified scheduler. wiki for realtime feedback
• The hotel is expanding. so the front parking lot is chained off

Gotta remember to tell Liz that the general sessions need to use some additional PA gear. The speakers sound really muddy from the back of the room. which isn't helped much by Tim and Ben's tendency to speak veryveryquickly.

Still waiting for some sort of earth-shattering announcement. We're on Reason #5 (of 8) you need CF8 right now

I'm looking forward to CFUNITED this year (as I always have). This time around I'm presenting on the Flex toolkit for Apex. Apex is the on-demand programming language and API for their CRM offering. The toolkit is really easy to get started with. which means you can spend far more time thinking of cool and useful apps to build for your sales guys (and gals).

Aside from the speaking bit. I always look forward to hanging out with other developers and chatting about what we're all working on. I've learned a lot at CFUNITED (been going pretty much every year since 2000 when it was known as CFUN 2k) and hope to continue that trend this year. With CF8. Flex 3 and AIR on the agenda I'm sure there's plenty to take in. It's not too late to register. so hit up your boss for some cash in a hurry and get down there!

Liz Frederick emailed me last Friday and asked if I would be interested in filling a speaker slot at CFUNITED. You bet!

I'll be doing an updated version of my Flex and Salesforce presentation that I gave at cf.Objective() a few weeks ago.

"Using the Adobe Flex toolkit for Salesforce.com"

Salesforce.com is great. but Salesforce with an effective and user friendly interface is even better. This recently-released toolkit makes it easy to integrate your in-house systems with Salesforce data. allowing you to build rich charting and dashboard interfaces with just a few extra lines of code. Once you've built your application. you can deploy it to the Salesforce.com servers. deploy it to your own web server for shared use or run it locally as an Apollo application. This presentation will cover the following: background on the features of the toolkit. configuring your Flex application. code reviews of three small Flex applications using the toolkit. the deployment of your Flex application into the Salesforce.com environment and the creation of an Apollo application that uses Salesforce data.

Rumor has it I'll be slotted in the afternoon of the first day. which should leave the rest of the conference wide open for me to enjoy!

One week left to post your requests for topics at CFUNITED 2007!

I put my name in the hat to talk about Farcry 4 - if there are other topics you want to hear about (or preferably speak on). go sign up now.

FC4 will be a great demo - I'm already thinking of doing the entire thing as an install -> configure -> deploy show. Much less emphasis on the Powerpoint (not that there was a ton last year). People always like to see the actual process instead of something canned or dissimilar to the experience they'll have using it.

Of course. all of that is dependent on Michael accepting my proposal to speak!

I wasn't 100% thrilled with my cfAjax presentation on Friday.

My flow wasn't there and I think it showed. I was somewhat unnerved by the number of people in the audience as well.

Corrective action was taken: 1) I chilled out with fun folks on the patio until late Friday night.

2) I walked in to the presentation on Saturday with a much better approach to the flow of the demonstration.

Result? A much better presentation. I felt great after the second take - hopefully this is the one that ends up on the conference video too. Next year i'll run my preso that one extra time before coming to the conference so that confidence is in place when it counts. not the day after.

All of the presentation materials are at http://www.countermarch.com/go/cfunited if you want 'em.