cf.Objective 2008 – Postscript

It’s over and few things need stating:

• cf.Objective repeated its performance as the awesomest conference ever
• The entire steering committee out did themselves in terms of content and speakers.
• Once again, the cf.Objective not only delivers great lectures from the experts, but the ability to actually interact with them.

Almost everything this year was better:

• Room scheduling – I saw no ad hoc room changes due to audience size.
• Power distribution – there were many outlets available in every room
• Venue – I thought the rooms and facilities were just as good as last year, but the staff was much more helpful.

On the con side:

• Wireless was terrible.
• The food was hit or miss.

Neither of those two facts was, in any way, a real problem for me. Put another way, if I traveled back in time to tell me that the wireless services and food would suck at cf.Objective 2009, I would still go. Then I would be very mad that I wasted time travel on that.

As with last year, I find myself building a list of things that I will challenge myself to adopt over the next year, after absorbing all of the geek radiation at cf.O. Last year’s list was about starting things: starting local development; starting to use ColdSpring. I think this is more about refining things I have used before, and getting the most out of them.

My cf.Objective 2009 ToDo list:

• Perfect my build process
  • Move all of my projects over to “perfect one step builds”
  • Utilize Subversion correctly with tags and branches
• Adopt an MVC framework
  • I’m leaning towards Model-Glue 3
• Start using AOP in ColdSpring
• Come up with a topic to speak again
  • I like talking about soft skills within technical areas, to that end I have a few ideas
    • Formal Code Reviews
    • Influence Techniques for Geeks
    • Hiring Effective Developers
    • Selling Professional Development to the Resistant Shop 2: Rise of the Uniformed
  • I might need to come up with some technical presentations,
    • Writing Boilerplate Code
    • Writing Code for Team Reuse
• Gain traction on the rumor that Mark Mandel has a marsupial pouch
• Collaborate more with people in the community
  • Contribute to someone else’s open source project
  • Work with someone just for fun
  • Team up with somebody for a side project

So that’s my list. I challenge everyone to coming up with their own, and posting it on their respective blogs.