The keynote certainly started with a bang, as Jason Delmore pulled a Mary Hart. So the keynote was cut a little short. That was disappointing, but thankfully, no permanent damage was done. Jason was just on the cusp of announcing that ColdFusion was going to an open process for development, getting a public bug tracker among other things. This is very promising!
I wandered into Kurt Wiersma’s presentation on Setting up a Solid Level Local Development Environment. I have to admit, I was mostly going to check up on what he recommended, because I had written an article in Fusion Authority Quarterly about the same subject. I had the fear that I was completely wrong or something. Good news for me, Kurt’s presentation recommended similar things where we overlapped. His presentation was really solid, with really good recommendations on how to setup your environment. I’m not just saying that because I agree with him, but because he gave really good tips and pointers for configuring your environment. Definitely pull down the presentation if he puts it online.
I skipped the second morning session to work on my presentation.
After lunch I went to Agile Bootcamp by John Paul Ashenfelter. This was a session that I was especially looking forward and it didn’t disappoint. John’s a great speaker. If I got nothing else out of it, I finally understand tags versus trunks in Subversion now. Additionally, in 20 minutes he did more to help me learn Selenium then I had after a week of trying to do it on my own. In total even if you knew some of this stuff ahead of time, it was extremely worthwhile.
I finished up my day torn between a few great presenters, but decided that I have never had a chance to hear Peter Bell speak and wanted to, so I went to his Software Product Lines lecture. He’s definitely a great speaker. Although to a certain extent, Peter’s blogging bandwidth is so high that if you read him, you’ll recognize most of what he had to say.
tpryan.blog 