Scotch on the Rocks: Coming on Strong

Tell me a little but about Scotch on the Rocks. What makes it unique?

What makes it unique I would say, comically, would be the raffles. We've come to have a renowned thing for having extremely long and stupid raffles at the end of every day, or at the end of every show that we have. And this year will be no exception to that. [Editor's Note: See our Scotch on the Rocks 2007 reports by Kola Oyedeji and David Beale, where the raffles are prominently mentioned.] But other than that, I think this year we've got one of the biggest lineups of some of the biggest named speakers in the US for the first time in the UK. The UK – or Europe – has always been quite far behind some of the bigger conferences in the US, where all the big names, like Ray Camden, are. Unfortunately, we didn't get him this year, but obviously with Sean Corfield, Matt Woodward, to name just a couple of them off the top of my head? So I think that's definitely our selling point over and above some of the other conferences that are going on in Europe this year.

So generally European conferences don't get these big name US speakers?

They haven't in the past. It's always been quite local speakers, because the cost is always the primary factor. It's certainly not cheap to put a conference on, as most of the guys out there know. But, this year, we decided that we really need to drive the UK market to come and see some of the big names and give something back to the community. So that is why we made the decision to bring as many as we could afford over this year – and maybe next year even bring more over, but that is yet to be seen.

So you basically said we have a budget, we'll set aside x pounds to pay for airfare, for hotel stays?

Yeah, we're flying most of the guys over and we're putting them up in a hotel. And a few of the guys had basically said ok, that's cool and they're bringing over their better halves, and some of them are bringing over their family and actually making a whole trip out of it, so the speakers are getting something out of it themselves, which is cool, and the European community is getting something out of it: the chance to come see these guys without having to go on an eight-hour flight themselves, maybe only an hour flight at the most, up into Edinburgh.

Wow. So you've never done this before...

No, we haven't done it before. The last ColdFusion conference was probably CFDevCon down in London, and I think that Charlie Arehart came along to that. And that was great. I think he was already over – that he was on vacation himself and popped along, so that was a great benefit. He did go down really well and some of the guys said, "I want to see more of these guys. We're Scotch, we should bring him along and give people what they want."

You must have had some good sponsorship support for this. I imagine this is not coming out of pocket.

There have been a few good sponsorship deals. Obviously with Abobe, they can't be left out of the pile. The Fusion Reactor people have certainly helped out a lot. Obviously there's Fuzzy Orange, the platinum sponsor and the main organizer of the whole show, run by Andy Allan. He's certainly put a lot behind this and a lot of time has gone into this from them and from some of the other organizing committee of the team. We've been supported quite well. And from a community point of view, there's a lot of people who want to get behind Scotch and see us flourish in a very hard market, especially this year, with CFUnited coming across the pond, and we've had the onAIR tour, which is from Adobe, over at the moment. A lot of people are still coming to see us, because we've got the lineup and we?ve got the speakers and we've got the sessions that appeal to the market.

That's great! So how did you decide who to bring in from the U.S.?

(laughs) Well, that wasn't left down to me, that was more down to Andy himself. He really has a good relationship with Sean and Joe Rinehart and Doug Hughes and Scott Stroz. Everybody had already heard about Scotch '07 and '05 – we had a year out in '06.

They were really up for it. It wasn't, "Oh, it's another conference to go to." I know Scott turned around and said, "It's in Scotland; can I play a lot of golf?" From that point of view, we knew he'd be straight over and on the plane as soon as we sorted that out. And I think he is bringing a lot of his family as well. So it's all good for these guys.

In terms of the topic do you have a specific focus? Or is it just general ColdFusion?

We tried to take a whole range of stuff this year. We've got three tracks in three days with no repeats. So it's been quite hard. I think it works out to 45 to 48 sessions. It's going to be quite a grueling day for some people. What we tried to do is to cover as much as much as we can. So Track 1 is solidly ColdFusion, and Track 2 is ColdFusion and how to use it with Flex and Air. Track 3 is more for the Air-type guys and the Flex guys who want to use it... I'm doing ColdFusion but how do I leverage Flex and AIR for my new applications?

We try to sprinkle in a couple of what we call "Inspire" sessions. At Scotch '07, there were a couple of sessions that just blew people away. We need more of these things because they get people's brains moving. People don't want to see code all the time. We're all typing code every day, which is bad enough as it is. So to go to a conference and see someone else write code... We decided that there should be more "Inspire" sessions saying, "Look at what we've done," so that these guys will go back to their companies and their bosses and say, "Look, let's start doing some of these cool apps for our clients," and hope that ColdFusion doesn't get a bad name and as we found out this weekend, it got kicked out of the Tiobe index, and actually prove to them that ColdFusion is alive and strong. Especially with ColdFusion being used as a back end for Flex and AIR, we've got some exciting times ahead.

Before they kicked CF out of Tiobe, we were actually climbing up to the top 20, I heard...

We were out of the top 20, back in the top 20. We were floating around for quite a while. Some did say to me, it's not the greatest listing. Even Ben Forta said he doesn't even look at it. Today when they did their update and they said, ColdFusion isn't a programming language but CFML is.

That makes no sense.

It does and it doesn't; ColdFusion is the name of the application server, which is a framework on top of Java, but you write CFML in it. It was certainly a wrong decision. I think if this Richard Bremner ever appears again, a CF guy might try to hunt him down. [Laughs] It's a bit unfair of them to mention his name and say, "Well, he said..." They should have done a bit more research.

I think a lot of people don't do research. They hate ColdFusion and say it's dead, it's dying. A Computerworld article did that a few months back and had to change their stance. Tiobe had to do the same thing, because they got a lot of emails from it, which really shows that the community cares. It's one of the greatest communities to be in, but also one of the most frustrating communities. But we're coming together now. The more we're able to show the speed at which we can develop something, ColdFusion's certainly going to be up there with the big boys. If we use our little tricks of renaming our articles to have the keywords that they search for, I'm sure we'll be in the top 20 again...

It's kind of silly because no one says, "I program in ColdFusion Markup Language" or "I program in CFML." We say, "I program in ColdFusion." And we write articles that say "ColdFusion," not "CFML."

Yeah.I'm thinking about going retro and saying I write in DBML.[Laughs]

By their own criteria, they should take out PHP.

Well, this was a discussion that my boss and I had. He said, "How does this work? How does CF get dropped and not PHP?"

It's a bit stupid, I agree. Well, let's get back to the topic of Scotch on the Rocks. You have some inspirational sessions. I see things like "Getting Dynamic with ColdFusion," "RIA meets Desktop, Introduction to AIR API's". You have some really sweet-sounding sessions...

It's really going to drive the people that are out there. They've seen all the hype about Adobe AIR, and some of the other stuff that's coming on the horizon, like Pacifica and Thermo. ColdFusion developers need to be shown how to do it, and then they'll just grab it with both hands and run with it. You'll see some really big apps being built, and the sessions at Scotch will certainly do that – they'll show that you can build a very simple web browser. I actually did that over the weekend myhself; I built a very simple web browser to show how easy AIR was. There were officially 5 or 6 lines of MXML. It compiled very quickly. They were blown away. The reason I got into that type of thing is because I was shown how to do it myself. I wish I had this five years ago; you can really do some nice stuff with it. A lot of people have a lot of good ideas in their heads but they don't know how to get them out in code. AIR will allow that to happen and some of the sessions at Scotch will allow that to happen. One of the big things that always happens at Scotch is that the presenter will give out his email address and there'll be a conversation between the guys in the audience, and that one session has kicked off some really nice applications.

I believe that you said that Scotch will have about 150 people this year? That's small enough that you really have a level of intimacy that you won't get at CFUNITED.

That's one of the big things that Scotch does have going for it. Because it is smaller, you can really have one-to-one chats with people. In 2007, we just let it flow. It didn't flow as well as we liked. We came back and had our conversations and said, "This is what we're doing different for 2008." One of the big things we're going to do is that Andy, myself and one of the other organizers are going to go around and actually push the speakers to go out and talk to people, if they're not. If they're with the same group all the time, we'll try to move people around so that people feel that they're welcome and they've got their money's worth. A ten-minute chat with Charlie Arehart can really open your eyes.. His whole way of thinking and his knowledge are really unbelievable. Ten minutes with that guy can really push you a long way. The same with all the others speakers that we have.

This is really going to open people's eyes and they'll see that these really aren't special people; anyone can do what they do.

Scotch sounds like a wonderful conference. I find it interesting that at a ColdFusion conference, you have a track focused solely on RIAs.

One of the things we've been getting from the community is, "I've heard about AIR but how do I do it? I've heard about Flex but how do I do it?" How do you write your ColdFusion application so that it integrates with these other applications?

Can you tell us something about the travel over there?

Edinburgh as a place is outstanding. You can walk everywhere. It's got a castle, it's got a dungeon, it's got a lot of bits and pieces... Most flights come into London, into Heathrow. A couple of weeks is really what you need. You can spend a couple of days in London. You can spend a lot of time in Scotland, going on the tours up to the highlands to see the beautiful, untouched landscape up there... the salmon farms... and the crystal factory just outside of Edinburgh.

Last year we had one guy from the states and he was given the choice to go to CFUNITED or Scotch. He said, "I'll go to Scotch. I'll spend two weeks in Scotland," and he did. He really did enjoy it. I'm not sure if he's bought a ticket yet this year, but I'm excited to see a couple of guys come over. I think it will be worth the trip.

Do you have any evening events at Scotch?

We've got two birds-of-a-feather sessions, one on Open BlueDragon and one on ColdFusion 9 on the next day. I believe one of the sessions has free drinks, and I'm not sure which of the sessions that is.

I believe at MAX Europe, the birds of a feather session for ColdFusion did get quite heated about how Europe was being left out of the loop a lot. Things did sort of change. They have created a ColdFusion sales rep position for Europe, which is good. Now we have an Adobe Developer Relations Manager for EMEA, Sumi Lim. She's always messaging a lot, making sure we're happy and keeping the community going.

There is always drinking to be done after a day of Scotch. We do drink and have a good laugh in a few bars in Edinburgh. We start off together, but we soon split off into little groups. We certainly do have a good laugh, and fun is had by all – one of the big selling points and why people come back to Scotch is for the community spirit.

How do you see ColdFusion in the UK? Is it on the rise?

I see it from two points of view. Being the current lead developer and the developer manager for a small company, I've had to recruit five developers in the last few months. Which is hard at times – you think you can't find any developers cause all the good ones are taken.

But on the flip side of it, you hear about certain companies dropping it and moving over to PHP and ASP. Primarily the reason in the UK for companies dropping ColdFusion is not because of the technology itself. They know how quick it is and what it can do. It's that they can't find the staff to code it. So I've spoken to a few people at Adobe about how to change this. One of the ideas is to give ColdFusion Enterprise free to academic units. There are a lot of universities that use ColdFusion for their websites, but they don't teach it as part of their courses.

But that's certainly changing. We did Scotch on AIR, which was in Dublin in April. The onAir Tour for Dublin was cancelled, but I'd already booked my flight and stuff like that to go out and promote Scotch. So I got in touch with guys in Adobe - Mike Chambers, Ryan Stewart, Ted Patrick. I said, "Look, Guys, I'm already flying out there. Is there anything we can do?" So Ryan and Ted came back and said, "Yeah, we're with you there. We've already booked our flights, too."

So I got in touch with the user group out there in Ireland. We booked a bar, got a projector, and we had myself talking about Flex and LiveCycle, Ted Patrick talking about Flex and Ryan Stewart talking about AIR. It went down really well. We had 50 people, for a very last-minute thing, and it was a very good turnout.

A couple of people there said, "Yeah, we're using ColdFuson." One lady there came up and said, "I'm doing a degree at university here, and I've been wracking my brains on how to do something, and I took up ColdFusion six weeks ago, and I've done everything I wanted to do. If only I'd found it earlier!" It was such a great thing to hear – someone new to the community realizing how good it is. She had touched PHP, she had touched ASP and found them too difficult. The power that CF gave her! She'll be getting her degree now with almost very little work from the CF side. And she won a free ticket that we gave away to Scotch. So she'll becoming along.

I recruited a junior developer last week. He's touched CF once or twice and he was blown away by the simplicity of it.

In the UK market and the European market, there are certain people still out there who could be blown away by CF and won't be put off by the slowness of the previous versions of ColdFusion that we had in the past. With ColdFusion 6 onwards, we've now gotten over that and there are certainly good times ahead for ColdFusion.

Any last advice you have for people who are going to Scotch?

Get a good night sleep the day before you turn up, because you won't be finishing until late, I can assure you.

Just the simple things: Drink plenty of water. We're going to put water everywhere and power supplies everywhere so people can plug their laptops in. One of the things that has been a let down in the conference market in the UK in the past has been a lack of power supplies and water available to delegates.

And wifi access, I assume? That's a given, right?

It wasn't at certain conferences – it was 25 pounds or $50 a day at some of the conferences that have been around. We are working out a deal with the hotel to get that. WIFI has to be there. We want people to twitter and live blog. There are going to be a lot of announcements from Scotch from many different environments.

So for people who want to sign up, how much is it again?

It's 299 pounds plus VAT – it's $600 for three days. It's three fun-packed days, so you certainly come away with a lot. There's a one-day and two-day pass as well, which come out at $300 for the one day and $400 for the two-day pass. People pick the days they want, as long as they're consecutive days.

A flexipass is mainly for companies – a flexipass allows them to send up to 3 people on different days. If a company can't afford to send three people, they can buy a flexipass and send three people for three different days.

It's got something for everyone there.

Do you have any special deals for alumni or for user group members?

This is one of the cheapest conferences in the UK. We've kept it down to a bare minimum. So no one gets anything free. I'm not even getting anything free, nor is Andy. We're all having to buy our own tickets. We're giving away tickets as a promotion, but Andy, the rest of the conference organizers and I have to pay for our own tickets and hotel rooms. But that's okay. We're all in the same boat as everyone. We'll certainly make it fun. Just hoping to drive people in the community and get people going in the right directions.

So go to http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/ to sign up!

Thank you so much, Kev.

No... Thank you!