An Architect's View

On July 13th, 2011 Robert C. Martin (aka "Uncle Bob") gave a talk at Skills Matter in London called The Last Programming Language. He was scheduled to give a version of it as the keynote for ACCU 2011, a conference I remember with fondness from my days back in England as a member of the Association of C and C++ Users! You can read Martin's blog post about the talk here but note there's a $2 charge to watch the version linked from that blog post - the Skills Matter version linked above is free.

TL;DR: He asks whether we've exhausted all possible programming paradigms and languages and whether we should now consider a single standardized programming language (and offers a suggestion of what that might be). Preposterous?

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This year's cf.Objective() was the biggest, most successful ever: more attendees, more speakers, more tracks, more content, more sponsors, lightning talks, BOFs, ad hoc sessions - more, more, more! Yet it still managed to maintain the great ratio of attendees to speakers that gives people a small conference feel with great networking opportunities.

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Now that the online scheduler is available, I've been picking the sessions I'll be attending at cf.Objective() 2011

Thursday, May 12, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 1 - Keynote (TBD)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 1 - Making Legacy Code Testable (Emily Christiansen)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 1 - ORM Zen (Marc Esher)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 5 - ColdSpring 2.0 Alpha 1 "What's New and Improved" (Mark Mandel)
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Room 5 - Forms That Don't Suck (Quick, Easy, & Clean Forms and Data) (Matt Quackenbush)
• 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM: Room 3 - Implementing an In-Memory Distributed Cache Using ColdSpring AOP and Ehcache (Adam Bellas)

Friday, May 13, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 2 - Introduction to Browser Automation and Testing with Selenium (Bob Silverberg)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 2 - Web Single Sign-On and ColdFusion (Adam Crump)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 5 - Simple MVC with FW/1 (Daria Norris)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 1 - Holistic Program Quality and Technical Debt (Nathan Strutz)
• 3:00 PM - 5:15 PM: Room 1 - Deep Dive: Multi-Tenant, Multi-Lingual Web Platforms - Software as a Service (Sean Corfield)

Saturday, May 14, 2011

• 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Room 1 - What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?) (Sean Corfield)
• 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM: Room 1 - Don't Forget About Custom Tags (Steve Bryant)
• 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM: Room 1 - Getting to Know AntiPatterns (Emily Christiansen)
• 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM: Room 1 - (Abstraction + CF9 ORM) == "Modeled in Minutes" (Matt Quackenbush)
• 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Room 5 - Simplifying Development with ColdFusion on Wheels: An Introduction (Chris Peters)

Some difficult choices there because there are some killer sessions on the schedule!

Following hot on the heels of OpenCF Summit in Dallas, I headed to England (this time with my wife) for Scotch on the Rocks in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland. I spent a lot of time engaged in hallway talks during the day and long discussions in the bar during the evenings so I must confess that I saw very, very few of the sessions. I would have attended more sessions but I was generally a bit late to each one (due to aforementioned hallway conversations) and it seemed that every session I wanted to attended was already completely packed out the door - my sense is that the Apex International Hotel, while perfectly wonderful in many ways, doesn't have enough large conference rooms to handle the number of attendees that Scotch is attracting these days.

With that complaint out of the way, how was the conference? Well organized, well attended and packed with great content.

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My two presentations from the OpenCF Summit are available on my presentations page: CFML and the Open Source Landscape (updated), Open Source Language Evolution (new). The conference team are putting up links to all the presentations as they are made available, via the conference schedule page.

I'll blog my thoughts about the conference in a separate post shortly, possibly on the Railo Technologies blog.

cf.Objective() has just posted the draft schedule for 2011 and, as always, it's packed full of great sessions. I'm very pleased to announce that I am speaking again this year and I'll be bringing two brand new presentations to the conference:

• Multi-Tenant, Multi-Lingual Web Platforms - Software as a Service
• What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?)

The former will draw on work I did at Broadchoice, building their SaaS-based CMS platform, and more recently at World Singles, building their new internet dating platform. It will cover some of the challenges such systems provide (and various ways to tackle them). Sacramento CFUG will get an early sneak peek of this talk in a few weeks.

The latter will cover a style of programming that's been around for decades and has seen a massive resurgence lately as concurrency, parallelism and efficient use of multi-core / multi-CPU machines have become increasingly more important. While the talk will show examples from Clojure and Scala, I will also show how some of functional programming's powerful idioms can be used in CFML!

It's now official: I'm speaking at the OpenCF Summit in Garland, TX in February! This will be a unique event in the CF world, with its focus on open source, and it has a lot of interesting types of sessions on the schedule: Pecha Kucha, Open Spaces, Hackfests - as well as regular sessions - and several BOFs and panels!

In addition, many of the OpenCF Summit partners are listed, including Railo Consulting, O'Reilly Media, Packt Publishing, hosting companies and consulting groups.

I think it's one of the most exciting new conferences on the schedule - I hope lots of people will agree and take advantage of this event with it's low price of $199!

I'm very pleased to have been accepted as a speaker for Scotch on the Rocks 2011! Wow! What an incredible line up of speakers! It's going to be an awesome conference!

SOTR 2008 was incredible so I was very sorry to have missed SOTR 2009 - due to my wife breaking her ankle! Schedule and finances got in the way of me even considering SOTR 2010.

So what will I be speaking about?

To be honest, I don't know. Topics will be announced in about five or six weeks. I submitted three suggestions to the SOTR folks. I don't know what they'll pick.

But I want to open it up to everyone who'll be at SOTR 2011 - what would you like me to talk about? If there's a strong preference for a topic, even if it isn't one that I submitted, we'll see what we can do about accommodating your choice!

I didn't get to many sessions this year but I thought the last CFUnited was great! Here's my review of the event.

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By now, many of you will have read Adam Lehman's blog post that Adobe is no longer part of the CFML Advisory Committee. Adam has disabled comments on that post and folks have been asking me all morning for my take on this so, as chair of the committee, I'm going to post my thoughts - and leave comments open so the community can provide feedback.

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