CFUNITED -- My Own Reflections

Jul 01, 2005

By Jared Rypka-Hauer, www.web-relevant.com/blogs/cfobjective

Well, it's been a few days, and I've had time to absorb some of the "everything" that is CFUnited. I remember when I was little and my family would take a trip; invariably, my mother would wait for a while after we'd returned home before asking, "What was your favorite part?" Generally, that's difficult for me to answer because I tend to take something away from nearly every experience.

In this case, I have some favorites.

This was my first convention of any kind in my professional history and I was more than thrilled to be there. Completely, utterly psyched. And as badly as I wanted to be a good boy and attend the sessions, I had a really hard time sticking to my session schedule; instead I spent 90% of my time at the conference talking to people in tiny, little breakouts that can only happen while the mainstay of attendees are tucked quietly away in front of their favorite speakers.

On Wednesday, I had a fantastic breakout like that with Rob Brooks-Bilson. It was Rob, me, and a couple of the guys from ColderFusion (the Twin Cities' CFUG). Ray Camden stopped by for a minute, and I suspect a few others. (Please forgive me if I've left you out ... It's been a harsh week in terms of information overload!) We discussed a few subjects that were pertinent to our specific situations ... frameworks, workflow, job markets, and other ColdFusion-related events. It was a good start to a fantastic week.

The rest of Wednesday passed in a blur. Finally, the end of the day came, and I was off to the Model-Glue BOF as a panel member. It was exciting to be involved in front of an audience with Joe Rinehart, Doug Hughes and Sean Corfield. It was excellent of Michael Smith to add the MG BOF at the last minute and give us an official place on the schedule, a real room in which to do it (instead of the community pit), and a bit more publicity than we may have had otherwise.

After the MG BOF, I had one of the more exciting opportunities of my life. I spent two hours sitting in the hotel bar with Michael Dinowitz and Ben Forta, discussing publishing, ideas and opportunities, and the costs and benefits of being in the computer-book-writing business. For a dude from MN who picked up a copy of CF-WACK 4.0 in the winter of 1998 and started writing ColdFusion applications (my first app went into deployment in Spring 1999), getting to spend time discussing those topics with Ben was completely awesome and Michael is a complete delight.

I remember realizing as I fell asleep that this was just the end of Wednesday and it already felt like I'd been there for 3 days. I have to say, that just the one day would have been worth it all by itself.

Thursday morning came, surprisingly, right on time. I expected it to arrive early and have to run to catch up, but as it turned out I was ready and on the move by about 8:10 AM. Downstairs and to a session or two, and then into the community pit to share a table with Simeon Bateman, Barney Boisvert, Paul Kenney, Doug Hughes, and Joe Rinehart (somewhere there's a picture of 7 Macs and 2 PCs at that table!) Sean Corfield joined us a little later for lunch. I was working on some updates to the commonInterest application I wrote for CFUnited's website, and I had an awesome opportunity to spend some more time chatting with Michael Dinowitz and his delightful wife Judith.

Thursday afternoon I made it to a couple of sessions, but the big highlight for me was getting to meet Christine Lawson, head of the Team Macromedia program, and Hal Helms. I got to spend about 45 minutes sitting in front of the hotel with Hal, just visiting about this, that and the other thing. He's very thoughtful, soft-spoken, and we hit it off right away. It's nice to have someone like Hal greet you with "Jared! I hoped to meet you! I love your nOOb's series on your blog!" as he shakes your hand enthusiastically.

As much as I try to make my every day eventful, I can't say that sort of thing happens to me often. Sean, Hal, Michael, Ben, Robb, Simeon, Barney, Michael Smith ... all known and respected names, and now people I consider personal friends. It's just sort of mystifying to me sometimes.

I was invited to an early-evening hors'd'oeuvres session sponsored by one of the Macromedia teams between the end of the sessions and the birthday party (more on that in a minute), and I also managed to wedge the Bloggers' BOF in there too.

At the Bloggers' BOF, we had a pretty decent turnout and I finally got to meet Kai (bloginblack.com), Pete Frietag, the authors of FuseBlog and BlogCFM, and a few other folks (again, please forgive omitted names here). We discussed many issues relevant to blogging, such as the hows and whys that motivate people to blog, finding blogger software that fits your needs, photoblogging, technical vs. personal blogs, and commercial blogging. We just had a good time meeting people.

I've noticed a few new blogs online that were started that night or the next. I'm feeling inspired to revive an old project of mine, a blogger I created in 2001 that I was calling WritersGuild ... multi-user blogs, multiple blogs/user, and public vs. private blogs and entries. I'll keep word on that project posted on my blog.

Fortunately, Michael Smith scheduled the Macromedia-sponsored open bar for the ColdFusion Tenth Birthday Bash for after all the other events, so we were able to have a good, old-fashioned birthday bash! There was live music, birthday cake, and hours of conversation and laughter. This was the highlight of the week for me, when everyone just mingled and had fun.

Friday morning brought me to Damon Cooper's presentation on SMS Gateways and their use in ColdFusion applications. It was a fantastic demo, with live code that actually sent SMS messages to some attendees' cell phones! It was very useful to see the system live, in action, and fully functional. I intended to make it to Tom Jordahl's presentation on advanced gateways, covering building them in Java. Unfortunately (or not), I got sidetracked in yet another mini-breakout.

I actually got a brief one-on-one lesson in CSS from Sandra Clark. I think one of my favorite quotes from the whole week is from her? She took one look at the source of one of my documents and said, "I really like the direction you're headed here ... good job! You just did everything wrong in the code I'm seeing." I love it when people are blunt in situations where there's open conversation going on, and that particular comment was just delightful. No, really, I mean it! It made me laugh!

Friday night was filled with more hanging out and talking, having fun, and saying goodbye to new friends and new faces.

Ok, I said at the beginning that I was going to outline my favorite moments at the conference-- which, after having written this, apparently includes all of them! If you weren't there, you should have been and I'm expecting to see you there next time!

Jared Rypka-Hauer is the founder of Continuum Media Group, LLC. He is the author of two commercial products sold by CMG, LLC; a developer tool called SQLSurveyor, for database reference and code generation; and a PayPal/ColdFusion integration kit for CFMX called PayPalMX. Information on these products and the other services Continuum provides can be obtained on the company's website at http://www.web-relevant.com. Jared is a frequent presenter at the Minneapolis area CFUG and runs an online group for small business owners, called cfBusiness, at SmartGroups.com. He has contributed to the OpenXCF project, assisting with the Tartan sub-project and founding the Clarion sub-project. He also frequents several popular lists at houseoffusion.com.

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