An Architect's View

Now that the Saturday schedule is available on the CFUnited site, I can confirm that I'm speaking three times in total:

• Thursday 9:00am - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• Friday 2:00pm - FW/1: The Invisible Framework
• Saturday 4:00pm - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape

Hope to see you at CFUnited - it's the last one so it will be legendary!

This blog post captures my current thoughts about the sessions listed so far for CFUnited 2010 - and how many difficult choices I'm going to have to make between lots of great sessions. I think this is the best line up ever for CFUnited!

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Voting ended March 31st and the most popular eight topics have been selected and added to the schedule for Friday night (22nd):

• 7pm - Test-Driven Development - Marc Esher & Bob Silverberg
• 7pm - Open Source Projects Discussion - Luis Majano, Mark Mandel & Matt Woodward
• 7pm - Extending Mura - Matt Levine & Sean Schroeder
• 7pm - ColdFusion "next" - hosts to be confirmed
• 8pm - Pecha Kucha - Bob Silverberg (host)
• 8pm - Being Agile - Peter Bell & Sean Corfield
• 8pm - Security - Justin Mclean & Jason Dean
• 8pm - Mobile Development - Andy Matthews & Dan Vega (and maybe Josh Adams?)

Thank you for all your suggestions and votes!

Today the CFUnited team published the full list of topics for CFUnited 2010 and I'm pretty impressed! In past year's I've grumbled that I've found it a bit hard to fill my schedule but there's a lot of variety this year and a lot of new and exciting topics. The changes to the process for picking submissions has clearly paid dividends. At a quick glance, I saw about 30 sessions that I'd happily attend so I'm looking forward to the scheduler being updated so I can start to plan my days!

Adobe will showcase ColdFusion 9 at cf.Objective() 2010 with six topics. The schedule has been updated with two Adobe topics each day and they are listed on the session page as well. We believe Terry Ryan will be handling most of the Adobe talks but we'll be confirming that as soon as we know for sure! Now that Adobe's talks are finalized, we'll be picking two more community submissions from our list and adding those. If you submitted a talk and wondered why you haven't received either an acceptance letter or a rejection, now you know. We hope to let everyone know within the next week! We're also ready to accept BOF suggestions - I'll make a separate blog post about that in the next few days.

The Content Advisory Board have finalized all the sessions for cf.Objective() 2010 and the accept / reject emails should start going out today to folks who submitted proposed talks! We have a draft schedule prepared already so as soon as the accept / reject letters are in the mail, we'll make a formal announcement and start updating the website so everyone can see what great content the conference is offering. Registration is already open and there is a broad selection of one-day and two-day pre-conference classes available this year!

David Tannersyn commented on my blog post about MFG.com taking three years to overhaul their web site. He's interested in a balanced argument as to why anyone would choose CFML over Java in this day and age. Here's David's comment, with my answers interspersed.

I spotted your comment on the Tech Crunch, MFG.com article (among many other CF advocates), found your blog, and had a look around.

The TechCrunch article received a lot of commentary from CFers, much of which bordered on fanboi-ism - which we as a community do tend to slip into because of our passion for CFML. Some of the comments were downright insulting (to TechCrunch and to MFG.com) which might be a whole bunch of fun but doesn't do our image much good when viewed from outside our community. Given some of the heat in the comments, I'm glad David still took the time to come here and ask questions - many folks reading those comments probably just wrote us off!

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A few people have asked on Twitter and via email what is happening with submissions that have been sent in to Jim and myself. We're a bit behind. We hoped to have reviewed all the submissions last week and to have been notifying everyone this week about accepted and rejected sessions. Sorry! We're actually about two weeks behind (which is just as well for a few speakers that are still submitting their sessions!). We've had over a hundred submissions so far and we will only be able to accept about half of them. There are some fascinating topics being submitted - in addition to the great topics suggested by the Content Advisory Board for the first round of invited speakers. We've also had multiple submissions from a number of speakers (up to six submissions from a single person!) which helps us a lot because we have a fixed limit on the number of speakers we can accept (for budgetary reasons). We should be able to get through the reviews next week and then we'll be notifying speakers the week after (the holiday week). We're hoping to have a list of sessions posted by year end and a rough schedule posted the week after. Registration should be open next week for those who want to get cf.Objective() into this year's budget without waiting for a published schedule.

Updated with the PDF to download to make the process easier!

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cf.Objective() 2010 is ramping up and is ready for the public call for speakers and topics! We have the same broad tracks as last year:

• Architecture & Design in Software
• RIA: Flex/Ajax/AIR
• Process & Methodology
• Integration & Tools

If you're interested in speaking, download the speaker request form (PDF, 152KB), fill it out and then send it to Jim Louis per the instructions in the form. The PDF has all the delivery dates, speaker consent agreement and so on. Topics must be submitted by November 30th! You have about two weeks. Some background on the cf.Objective() selection process... As I previously blogged, we have a twelve person content advisory board this year who have already come up with suggested topics for about 80% of the schedule and invitations have gone out to an initial list of speakers (usually two or three per topic). Many of those speakers have already replied (they also have until November 30th) and we're starting to sift through their submissions to pick the best one for each topic. The public CFP will help us fill the remaining 20% of the schedule. This process us ensures we have a well-rounded set of topics as well as letting us get at least part of our schedule organized and posted before the end of the year to help folks decide to register with their company's year end budget!

The Content Advisory Board (twelve of last year's speakers) have just finished their initial selection of topics and potential speakers for the four tracks at cf.Objective() 2010. Best Meetings, the cf.Objective() conference planner, will be sending out invites shortly, asking a variety of speakers to submit on topics that we've picked. Since this all happens behind the scenes, I thought it would be worth a blog post to explain the process. The CAB start by approving the tracks (we'll have four in 2010, very similar to the 2009 tracks) and then pick about a dozen topics they think 'fit' in each track. Some of these topics are popular staples, some are deliberately bleeding edge and / or very advanced, in keeping with the conference's reputation. Next, the CAB pick up to three speakers for each topic so that we get a chance to see multiple submissions on each topic and can pick what we think sounds like the best content for the attendees. Some speakers get multiple topic invites, some get only one. An invite is not a guarantee that you'll be picked but it gives you 'first shot' at slots on the schedule (indeed, about half the submissions are rejected precisely because we invite multiple speakers to submit on each topic!). Our goal is to fill about 80% of the schedule this way. Once we have the initial responses in, we'll open a public Call For Papers for general submissions to fill most of the remaining 20% (the platinum sponsor gets four slots plus a keynote). I think the CAB have done a great job this year and we have some great topics lined up. As soon as we can confirm speaker submissions, I'll post a list. In the meantime, here's the CAB volunteers:

• Architecture & Design in Software
  • Brian Kotek
  • Brian Meloche
  • Matt Woodward
• RIA: Flex / Ajax / AIR
  • Laura Arguello
  • John Mason
  • Dan Wilson
• Process & Methodology (including Frameworks)
  • Mark Drew
  • Adam Haskell
  • Kurt Wiersma
• Tools & Integration
  • Jeff Coughlin
  • Peter Farrell
  • Bill Shelton

Thank you!