CFML Language Advisory Committee
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Ben Forta has blogged regarding the recently announced CFML Language Advisory Committee – a very good read. Despite some cattiness and mild fundamentalism in the comments it’s worth checking out – I’m very glad to see this happening, and will be keeping a close eye on progress, getting involved in any way I can.
Congrats to Adobe and those on the committee – that’s what I call forward thinking.
Firefox 3
A while ago I switched to using safari full time on my macbook pro as it was faster and better integrated than my current version of firefox at the time. Today like many millions of people I downloaded firefox 3 and I have to say I am absolutely blown away. I love the new features that I’ve seen so far (it seems you either love or hate the new url bar), the cleanliness of the interface and my god it’s fast!
Plus an extension called picLens – if you haven’t tried it I urge you to check it out. It doesn’t work with all sites but it makes browsing google images, amazon products, deviant art pics and a number of other things an absolute dream. It also stops the weird issues I was having with flex builder where I’d run an app and it would load in safari, then the safari window would close and I’d have to do it a second time. Now my flex apps load super fast with no problems. And for a change, the default theme is the best one I can find – nice and clean and light.
Well done and thank you to the Firefox team!
WebDU 2008
Another year of webdu and as usual another success. The highlight of the conference this year I think was the trading card game introduced by Nectarine – people got really into it and it was fun to watch. I’m hoping that next year they’ll add attack and defence or something so we can battle for cards 
I must say I missed the banquet this year – I’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to sit and eat with other developers and have a good chat, but while it was a little hard to talk at Kingpin it was definitely fun. Very interesting to see who ended up on the karaoke machine toward the end of the night!
It was a different crowd this year – a lot of the familiar faces but I noticed a lot of the people who’ve been there the last few years were missing. I don’t know if it’s because they were looking for more advanced content perhaps, but it did somewhat change the atmosphere and camaraderie of the conference. The upside to that was that we seemed to have a much larger number of people from the flash and flex worlds among others, so there was a real cross disciplinary thing going on. Hopefully the same people will keep coming back and get to know each other!
One item I want to make a note of was Mike Labriola’s talk on the internal operations occurring in the first few milliseconds of your flex application starting up. Mike is a really nice guy and brilliant while he’s at it. He’s the kind of monkey who just can’t help tearing everything apart, and fortunately he’s all too eager to share his hard won knowledge with us lesser life-forms, so if you get the opportunity to go to any talk of his definitely attend – you’ll learn more useful things in an hour than you might at a whole flex course.
Thanks yet again to Geoff Bowers and the amazing team at Daemon – we’ll see you next year.
Enterprise Development for the Rest of Us
My first international presentation was at Scotch on the Rocks this year and I had a wonderful time. I must admit I was very nervous prior, not only from the general fact of presenting but because a) my talk was a little “fluffier” than most, as it was more soft skills based than technical, and b) because I was worried I wouldn’t pull off the magic tricks I worked into the talk 
As it turned out it went brilliantly – the talk and content were really well received, and the tricks went over nicely. I had three tricks during the talk, each of which were used to highlight or illustrate points, and I managed not to completely mess them up, which was nice One of the highlights of my entire trip was the look on Adam Lehman’s face when I tossed a ball of paper into the air and made it burst into flame… a couple of feet from where he was sitting His reaction brought a lot of laughs, and made it a great intro trick to grab people’s attention. As it turns out Adam is a perfect audience for magic, and I had a lovely time exhausting my entire repertoire of tricks while drinking over the next couple of nights.
After the talk I was really encouraged to have a lot of people thank me and make comments on the talk – I got some great feedback from the more experienced crowd and various luminaries in the audience, and some really inspiring comments from the junior and mid level developers. It seems the majority of the audience was made up of people who were working for corporations whose main focus is not necessarily IT or the web, rather than being consultants themselves or working in a development studio. This was great from the point of view of the talk, and through it I got to meet a lot of Scottish, English and European developers.
So thanks to all who attended, and especially all those who made nice comments afterward! Hopefully I’ll give this talk at WebDU next year, and be back at Scotch with another one.
Adam, I promise not to singe your eyebrows next time…
well, not on purpose anyway.
Belated Scotch post
Well I finally found a moment to myself and the energy to blog! Scotch on the Rocks is well over now, but I didn’t want to let it go without a post as it was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to.
I had an absolute ball in Edinburgh – the conference itself is as has been mentioned very casual, and as such has a brilliant atmosphere, which I think was a large part of the reason we had such good BoF sessions where everyone joined in, junior and well known developers.
Three days packed full of fun, excellent talks from the intro to the advanced, and some seriously good times catching up, networking and drinking with people from the community. Andy Allan, Big Mad Kev and Stephen Moretti did a brilliant job of managing the event, and were a lot of fun to get to know, not to mention Andy’s lovely and talented wife Leanne, who also had a large hand in the organizing, and was a very gracious hostess
Edinburgh is my favourite city in the world, and it is a fantastic place for a conference. The nature of the setup, plus the type of people the conference attracts made for an amazing junket of learning, sharing and getting to know the community. I met all kinds of people, made some good business contacts and I think made a few new friends as well – and as always it’s nice to be able to catch up in person with those on our IM contacts list whom we only see once or twice a year.
If you didn’t make it to Scotch, I would seriously recommend putting the money aside for next year. Not only is it an absolute blast but it’s a serious investment in your development education and can greatly expand your personal network within the industry. The conference itself could have cost three or four times as much and it would have been worth every penny – I came from Australia and stayed in town for a fortnight and my only regret is that I have to wait another year to do it again!
Congratulations on a brilliant event Andy et al, and thank you very much for an enlightening and hugely fun three days.