I had the pleasure of attending the OpenCF Summit this year (http://opencfsummit.org/) in Garland, TX. Luckily I live down the road a piece in Allen, TX so it wasn’t a far trek for me. Summarizing the experience into a word for me would be “worthwhile”, but perhaps I am jumping ahead.
One of the coolest parts about this conference was getting to meet a lot of the cool people I have interacted with on various social media outlets. It is always good to put a face to the tweets and personality. I also consider it energizing to feed off the air of enthusiasm of other people who are passionate about the CFML language, and there certainly was plenty of that to go around!
Presentations of note (to me at least) were some of the really cool things Railo and team are doing. Gert peeled back the covers a bit to show off some of the more useful/cooler features of Railo, including the highly useful abilities of specifying session storage. Highly versatile!
Allan Williamson presented on CFML and OpenBD and the challenges of huge scale. Some of the techniques he presented on were downright inspirational. The topic covered everything from high visibility, centralized logging, fire-and-forget cloud instances, and even general techniques for preparing your CFML code for high scale. I have to admit that when he spoke on how his organization doesn’t even bother to turn on SSH access to their cloud instances because they can shutdown and spin up new ones so easily, my mind pretty much blew out of the back of my skull.
Other presentations I enjoyed included a lightning talk on the life and death of stars and star systems by Christian Ready. Daria Norris talked about the very cool things they are doing with CFML at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Google Maps laid over old town maps was pretty cool.
I also participated in the Hackfest. I admit I was a bit nervous as I’ve never really contributed to an ongoing open-source project that I didn’t just make myself and upload somewhere. There were several challenges for me personally, as I am brand new to Git, never used the Mach-II framework (in any serious capacity), and generally groan when I have to use ColdSpring. Don’t get me wrong, all good products, but not generally my cup of tea. Just the same the experience was rewarding and I was happy to contribute. I always enjoy learning a few new things when I can.
Overall OpenCF Summit felt like a success to me, and I look forward to attending next year.