Unleashing the Developer at ColdFusion DevCamp

What made you decide to do a ColdFusion DevCamp?

I presented my idea to Sid and he thought it was great and ran with it. As you know, Sean Corfield was the lead guy running BACFUG [(The Bay Area ColdFusion User Group)] the last two years. When Sean stepped down as manager in March of this year, Sid took over.

Unfortunately the ColdFusion user group here in the area has not been as robust as it has been in past years.

I would say the attendance is definitely up and down and not very consistent.

They've had meetings with three or four people, sometimes with 12 people. Meanwhile the Fireworks user group can get 60 people on a regular basis, and I am not even going to mention the numbers Photoshop draws.

So you're doing this to revitalize BACFUG?

I had done the preDevCamp in August which helped revitalize the Palm community, which many people had written off as dead.

I wanted to do something like it to help the ColdFusion community that had basically been the driver of my career for the past 7 years.

It's very sad to see that BACFUG dwindled so much from the hundreds of people it had in the late 1990s to early 2000s to the very small regular membership it has been attracting at the meetings. This was not the fault of the managers but of a general perception in the Bay Area that is ColdFusion is dead. The main mission behind cfdevcamp is to reenergize BACFUG and bring more new people into the technology we love.

If it was successful for Palm, I knew a DevCamp could be successful for ColdFusion. It was great that Sid thought it was a great idea and really took the ball and ran with it.

Taking over a user group from such a person as Sean — it's hard to fill the shoes. The rampup to this ColdFusion DevCamp has helped me take the lead and put my stamp on the user group.

I'm definitely going to work on balancing meetings between beginner and advanced topics. I'm excited about seeing new people come into the ColdFusion community.

It's split down the middle between advanced CF people and people who have never done ColdFusion before. We've advertised this in the regular ColdFusion circles but then we email blasted and sent stacks of postcards to other user groups, and it's been very popular at both the Photoshop, Fireworks and Flex user groups.

I've been very excited to see a lot of people learning CF who have never learned it before. We are very lucky that the Managers of the other Bay are groups work so well together and really help promote events like this one to their members.

Over a dozen experienced ColdFusion people will be acting as mentors for the day.

This is organized on the style of a barcamp or an iphone devcamp [beautifully described at http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/07/13/what-is-a-devcamp/]. Basically it will be team/project focused. We will have a big white board for people to put up project ideas they want to work on.

Then we will give each team a sign to put up on their table so people can find them and join their project. If people are interested in building that application, they'll come over to the table and start working together.

I found at preDevCamp that people hook up and organize well on their own. Getting many disciplines at a table talking can get some amazing results. For example, a designer/UI person could be working with a hard-core developer.

Freeform collaboration between the people who are there...

I've talked to some of the mentors who will be there about putting together a small project plan of putting together HTML files with some forms.

We want people to explore their own passions or project ideas with the help of the person sitting next to them.

At the 360|Flex, they did a day 0 with a day of training and I had finished the project early. So I pulled down an XML feed from Craigslist and started really exploring what I could do with the data. I had that to take home with me and it made me much more excited about Flex as a technology. I really hope we get a lot of that same idea at our camp.

It sounds like this is a freeform event with some structure to it...

We're really trying to not have a lot of structure. That's the idea behind devcamp — that lots of structure is bad. The structure just comes together.

We're doing this at Adobe's town hall, which is a cafe-style space rather than a classroom. We'll have people clump together in teams more.

The matching of different facility levels will be a plus for our camp — the experienced ColdFusion people together with people who have never worked with ColdFusion before.

I'm looking forward to this. I don't think our community has ever done this — to have a DevCamp-style event. My hope is to make this a success so that it's become interesting to a lot of people.

Adobe is holding this at their SF offices. What other support are they providing?

It appears that we've got enough sponsorship to cover our food costs. Adobe is covering the cost of opening up their office space on a Saturday, along with with shirts for everyone and a copy of ColdFusion 9 Standard as a raffle prize.

It's not really the prizes and the raffles, although we have some great ones. It's getting new people into ColdFusion that's the focus. Still, we have a ton of great sponsors. Adobe, RoundPeg and AMD are some of our biggest, with many smaller ones such as TechSmith, CVSDude, Sonic.net, The Morphic group, Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and many others really coming out to help the community.

It's a difficult balance you're trying to keep here, between the newbies and the experienced ColdFusion folks.

We're very fortunate with the mentors that we have. I'm really excited to see how that works here.

With having Adam and having all these people there for the day, it will be interesting to see people coming together.

Everything worked out really well with ColdFusion 9 launching before the event.

So tell me about the preDevCamp — the first time you did this...

The site for preDevCamp is http://sanfrancisco.predevcamp.org/. The blog chronicles the 11 days of chaos that I experienced organizing that. I got 150 people to show up at Palm headquarters that day.

It ended up working out very well and Palm became very supportive. Adobe was also very supportive of the Pre Dev camp and donated some copies of CS4. At the Palm camp, with everything coming together so fast, we ended up with $800 in sponsorship and $4000 in merchandise giveaways. It was an exciting event, and it was cool to pull it off in 11 days. ColdFuson's been off a lot of these tech pundits radar for a long time and I wanted to do this for ColdFusion. I really wanted Sid to come in and lead, and he's done such a great job.

Robert Scoble (http://www.scobleizer.com) helped me a lot in publicizing the preDevCamp.

I take it cfdevcamp is free?

100% free.

We are competing that day against a 360|Flex, which is unfortunate, but with so many events in the Bay Area it is always hard to pick a weekend.

We didn't want to conflict with CFinNC or BFusion or MAX or RIA Unleashed or Thanksgiving, which basically limited our choices to Nov. 7th.

What's really cool about this camp is that people that I've never talked about ColdFusion to asked me whether I was going. That's really exciting because it's got more potential to get people into cf.Objective(), to BACFUG...

The experts seem to change over time and you don't see new experts coming into the community. That's the kind of thing I'd liked to see happen.

I'd like to see 50 designers come into the community. Coming from the HTML/CSS world, the first time you see ColdFusion tags, it makes sense.

What is your goal for the community with cfdevcamp? Do you have any plans to do other cfdevcamps in other areas?

I'm hoping that the DevCamp will spread... that ColdFusion will spread. The whole idea is that we do these camps so that people can learn the technology. We want our existing users more involved and hope those new to ColdFusion become members of our user group.

The skills gap between CF people — there's not a lot of those intermediate level ColdFusion developers.

I want to develop ColdFusion people at every level.

This is the first ColdFusion event with this bar camp structure. I don't think I've seen any other ColdFusion entity do that. It's exciting. It's a hands-on way to get a whole bunch of new people into the community — and trying to get the language back on the radar.

The closest we've come is the Unconference at MAX that Ray Camden organized. But that didn't have a coding jam or DevCamp. It was great but still more of a lecture format than get together and hack.

How hard was it for you to get the space from Adobe?

To get town hall on a Saturday is almost unheard of, and normally very expensive. Adobe's not providing huge amounts of monetary support, but they are going out of their way to make this a success.

My biggest problem with preDevCamp was getting the space.

I'm hoping that we can change this from the marketing piece that Adobe has about ColdFusion — that brochure — to basically make the devcamp available to any user group anywhere that wants to plan one.

Well you guys really make me want to attend. Now I wish I could go to cfdevcamp!

The point is that this is the first, but hopefully when this one is successful, other user groups will organize their own cfdevcamps...

And where can people find out more about this and sign up?

Just go to http://www.cfdevcamp.org/. I really hope this is just the first of many ColdFusion DevCamps to come; I would love to be talking to you next year about the 10th cfdevcamp that had just been held somewhere.

I hope you will, Luke. Thanks for talking with us, guys.

Thanks for helping us spread the word.