The Fusebox Conference 2000

The "First Ever" Fusebox Developers Conference was held in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday, September 16th. The conference facility was right on the edge of the University of Virginia, which allowed out-of-town attendees a chance to see some tourist sites (UVA has a beautiful campus). Steve Nelson?s SecretAgents.com, Michael Smith?s TeraTech, Shannon Smith and the Zebra-print-collared guys from Media Matrix, Hal Helms? iAcademy Traning, and Joel Smith from Realitysmith were conference sponsors. The conference was overbooked with 150 people in attendance, even though the capacity was 130. I?m glad the fire marshall didn?t show up!

Registration began at 8:00am, and there were a lot of comments like, "Oh, so great to put a face to a name," as attendees met one another and enjoyed coffee, tea, and donuts. TeraTech staff ran the check-in/registration process which was a breeze, with carefully printed nametags for each attendee.

Steven Nelson and Michael Smith opened the event and Michael spoke briefly on why Fusebox has been so successful (hint: it is not just the clever technology, but the very helpful Fusebox community too!).

The conference kicked off right on time at 9:30am, with Fred Sanders presenting an ?Introduction to Fusebox? talk that was perhaps a bit too basic. Nonetheless, people had questions about lots of topics (including some new additions to the Fusebox Methodology like URL files), and he answered them well.

We had a brief break after that, and people mingled and checked out the sponsors? tables. SecretAgents.com was sponsoring a raffle to win a HandSpring Visor and a flatbed color scanner. Many people took the opportunity to enter the raffle. Naturally, the entry system was a Fusebox application, allowing contestants to enter electronically.

Next came Hal Helms' presentation on Fusedocs and the spec-to-prototype-to-development cycle. Being quite charismatic and knowledgeable, he was a crowd favorite. He took about a zillion questions and Michael Smith (who was running the operations for the day) had to drag him off, telling people to hold their questions until the end of the day for the discussion panel. (This panel never happened because the speakers ran too long.)

Without a break, Nat Papovich jumped in and gave a light-hearted, heavy on laughs presentation on web-based applications, particularly using frames. He presented a simple way to embed frames in a Fusebox application. In fact, he showed an example of a single display page made up of seven frames, spanning five frameset tags, and three circuit applications. Again, his question and answer period was cut off for lunchtime.

The gourmet box lunch was tasty and plentiful, with vegetarian options available. There was no noticeable kosher food, but perhaps no one had requested it. People had a good time absorbing the completed talks and querying the speakers about intricacies of their topics. Steve Nelson, the conference organizer and a co-author of the upcoming Fusebox book, presented a Fusebox-based security model. There weren't many questions afterward, possibly because his speech touched on Fusebox basics again.

Then, Gabe Roffman talked about a new concept of his, called the application object model. It is a way to create a server-side object model for variables based on JavaScript?s Document Object Model (DOM). Because this concept is still in its infancy, he was not able to answer many questions. But, because of Roffman?s previous contributions to the community, people thought that it was cool that they could take part in a concept that was evolving even during the presentation. It is a fascinating topic and was well covered.

Steve Nelson gave another talk on his concept of the specification and design process, focusing on his theory that with enough practice and pre-planning, any site can be basically built (not necessarily fully developed) within 5-days. The crowd was skeptical. This concept is explained and enumerated in Steve's upcoming Fusebox book.

Finally, Doug Nottage gave a great talk on clustering and scaling. He was really hauling through the presentation, skipping multiple slides in a row. He has given the same show in the past and it has consumed 3 hours. He completed it this time in about 90 minutes. Although not really Fusebox-specific, it was nice to hear from a big-name ColdFusion dude. He was pestered all night long at the beer bash about how AutoByTel.com was able to handle a 1900% jump in hits following Super Bowl commercials - finally he agreed to talk again at CF_Scale in November.

The general mood of the attendees was casual but interested. The facility was good, except a large pillar in the back, obscuring the view for some people. The sponsors seemed pleased, and the beer bash held at Awful Arthur?s was great. Lots of fun was had by all. Tons of spicy shrimp, buffalo wings, crab dip, and beer were consumed. The group didn't leave until the bar closed at 2:00am! Many people thought that it was the best marriage of networking, fun, and serious content ever in a ColdFusion conference.

Alan McCollough filmed the conference, but unfortunately, the sound didn?t come out at all. There are however, a few funny RealVideo clips of some of the non-conference festivities available at http://users5.50megs.com/fusebox2000/. The presentations from the speakers are available on Fusebox.org at http://www.fusebox.org/content/index.cfm?fuseaction=presentations and an outline of the day?s events, presentations, photos and speaker bios can be found at CFConf.org http://www.cfconf.com/fusebox_fun/.

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