Objective Bias

I've been lurking around the ColdFusion blogosphere for a while now leaving the occasional comment, but now I've decided to start blogging myself. Why now? Well, the occasion that has prompted my first blog post is that I won a free pass to the CFUnited Conference!

A couple of months ago, Raymond Camden ran a contest in which people suggested topics for a session at the conference, then there would be a vote and the person with the winning topic gets a pass to CFunited. Yesterday on the CFUnited blog, it was announced that the winning session was "Prototyping for Smarties" with Hal Helms and Clark Valberg. Another entrant suggested prototyping as a topic, but the powers that be deemed my suggestion (interface driven development -- also by Hal and Clark) to be similar enough to the winning entry to grant both of us free passes!

This is exciting for me not only because I co-won the contest, but because this will be my first ColdFusion conference. Being a part-time freelance developer (moving towards full-time), I don't have the luxury of a company paying my way to conferences (because "the company" is me), and I'm not at the point now where I have room in my budget for conferences like these. I've been reading all the blog posts describing how great cf.Objective() was, and now I'm really looking forward to experiencing  a conference like CFU for myself and have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with people in this great CF community who I already feel like I know on some level from reading blogs, posting to forums, attending Connect presos, etc.

I know that the focus of cf.O and CFU are different (with cf.O known as the "advanced" conference). I have to say that I think CFUnited will be perfect for me right now. Although I've started using some "advanced" techniques and methodologies, I still consider myself to be firmly in the "intermediate" category. So I don't think I would've gotten the most out of a lot of the talks at cf.O (maybe in a year or two). The depth and breadth of the topics being presented at CFUnited are just awesome. For example, I think I'll be able to get a lot out of some of the more beginner level talks, like "Building your first RIA app with CF and Flex" (being a Flex newbie myself). However, I'm also really looking towards some of the sessions in the advanced track, like Peter Bell's "RAD OO" and John Farrar's "JQuery/CF Integration". Looking at the topics, I feel that CFUnited is THE conference for ColdFusion developers of all levels, whether they are beginners, advanced, or solid programmers who just have some weak points to work on (don't we all?).

I'd like to send big thanks out to Liz Frederick and everyone at TeraTech for their generosity. I definitely won't squander this opportunity they've given me. Of course, thanks to Ray Camden for running the contest and for everything else he does on a daily basis for the ColdFusion community.

p.s. I know it looks a bit sparse around here, but I'll be adding stuff and customizing the design eventually. Also, if anyone else going to CFU wants to split a hotel room near the conference, email me at tony at garcia dot net.