Author: tpryan

My first presentation was my own. I thought it went really well, but I over pruned and ran a little short. I might have been talking fast too, but through the magic of twitter, I got instant feedback.

Neurotic Terrance Ryan – the ultimate manipulator! 😉 from im

brandonmoser B. Arthur wrestlign a velociraptor is a great visual…awesome from twhirl

Neurotic I love Terrence’s slides.. I really need better pictures for slides! from im

Neurotic Terrance Ryan’s Professional Development in a Hostile Shop is really good! from im

seancorfield “patrick” and “john”… yeah, right… terrence nearly slipped up and used the real names 🙂 from twhirl

brandonmoser In Terrance Ryan’s talk on “Hostile Dev” at @cfobjective, so far a great talk from twhirl

seancorfield brilliant illustrative images in terrence’s talk! from twhirl

sharondio Nice use of Simpson’s imagery for “hostility” in Terry Ryan’s talk. from im

seancorfield “resistance is not hostility” 🙂 from twhirl

Woo hoo.

Next I went to Peter Farrell’s Using ANT : Make Your Development Life More Productive. Peter hit the standard stuff, but he also hit on some other ideas, like using running a var scope checker, or documentation building from Ant. Another cool point is that he pointed out things in Ant terminology as equivalent to Coldfusion terms. A lot of the tips and tricks were really useful; I’ll have to download the presentation.

I have to admit I was kinda high for the rest of the day after my presentation. I floated through Matt Woodward’s Michael Collins’ and Mark Mandel’s presentations. I got things out of them, but I have nothing to offer on the presentations. That’s not a reflection on the presenters. I was just too jazzed up. I’ll report more tomorrow.

Meanwhile I struggled with and won getting automatic tagging via ant to work on my machine. I have to say, I’ve really drunk the KoolAid about it, John Paul Ashenfelter is my new hero.

My presentation from this morning is now available on my site. Get it from the side bar or from:

Selling Professional Development Techniques at a Hostile Shop

Update:

According to his comments, Ryan Stewart doesn’t know what this “powerpoint thing” is ,and I need to use share before he could see this presentation.

https://share.acrobat.com/adc/flex/mpt.swf

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.

I owe a fair deal of success to my various experiences working with Avish Parashar.

He’s doing a free teleseminar about using developing and using humor in speaking. I haven’t heard this particular talk before, I will be listening to it, but I can attest to his expertise on this matter. Anyone who has a vested interest in… let’s say… enhancing a technical presentation to make it more interesting, would benefit greatly from what Avish has to say.

I figure it’s important to note, that he’s not about adding a joke or two to your presentations. He’s talking adding appropriate and topical humor to presentations. He’s also about teaching you to think on your feet, and respond to your audience with in-the-moment humor.

The seminar will be held Thursday, April 17th from 1:00PM EST to 2:30PM.

Find out more at Avish’s various sites:

• Free Teleseminar: Making the Most of Humor
• Avish Parashar
• Simple IT Success

Cf.Objective is in just a few weeks now. Are you going? Here’s why you should:

1. The content is the absolute best ColdFusion content around. I’m not just saying that because I’m presenting. No introductory stuff, no “Getting started with CFC’s,” just really stellar content.
2. The price is right. I think the whole thing, including air fare, hotel, taxis, and food cost me under $1300 last year. That’s less than many local training courses, but provides so much more.
3. Access to the experts. Want to ask Ray Camden, Sean Corfield, Joe Rinehart, Mark Mandel, Mark Drew or one of the other experts something? Well they’re usually just hanging out in the halls. They don’t bite… Except for one of the Mark’s. I’m not saying which, but I think you’ll find it a pleasant surprise.
4. Everyone is a student. What are the instructors doing between their talks? Most of them are in other people sessions. I don’t know why this strikes me as so cool, but I guess it just feels so much more… collaborative than authoritarian. You’re not learning from experts, you’re an expert by being there, and sharing in the experience. Or I dunno, maybe that’s too granola for you all, but I like it.
5. If you don’t go Sean Corfield will hunt you down. You will be Ice-T in his home movie version of Surviving the Game. It’s true.

That’s right, today is your last day to get reduced prices for the WebManiacs conference. After today, the only way to get a reduced price is to take a picture of you flashing your gams, send it in, and hope the guys and gals at Fig Leaf approve.*

Of course, you want to go, and see me speak about Air and SQLite, so sign up and get that reduced pricing.

* Actually, I’m fairly certain that won’t work. And gams are legs, for those of you who didn’t grow up during the Great Depression.

Or I would be if you are subscribed to the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast.

I got to participate in the CF_Rountable, a new format for the show where a bunch of ColdFusion community members talk about various geeky topic fodder. This week’s group was:

• Sean Corfield
• Brian Meloche
• Me
• Brian Swartzfager
• Dan Wilson

This is in addition to the hosts:

• Matt Woodward
• Peter Farrell

It was a tremendously fun to participate. It was also impressive to see the amount of work and effort that Matt and Peter put into the podcast. They deserve a lot of credit for making it look effortless.

If you get a chance to participate, or see a call for participation, do it. You won’t regret it.

Come to think about it, you should probably listen to it too. You won’t regret that easier.

The ColdFusion community is aflutter with news that Blue Dragon has gone open source. Many other voices have chimed in on this. But I feel like I have something different to say.

Regardless of the any business gains that Blue Dragon gets from doing this, I don’t think the community will get a tremendous benefit from this.

You see, there is this stream of logic that goes something like this:

• ColdFusion has a small market share, and it is shrinking
• ASP.NET, PHP, and Ruby (on Rails) have much more of the market
• PHP and Ruby (on Rails) are Open Source and free.
• ASP.NET is zero cost on top of something else we forget you have to pay for
• ColdFusion would gain market share if it was open source.
• By “open source” we actually mean “free.”

I think this line of reasoning comes from people that base their request for opening up ColdFusion on what they think the rest of the web development world wants. They think it is all about cost. There are reasons that other people prefer PHP or Ruby (on Rails) or ASP.Net. Not all of those reasons have to do with ColdFusion’s cost.

• Some people just have to do many small CRUD apps. For just this specific subset of CRUD apps, Ruby on Rails is a better solution than a default install of ColdFusion.
• Some people want to build around one or several of the many open source applications written in PHP. Why use ColdFusion when you just have to write a few extra PHP pages.
• Some people have to work with proprietary Microsoft technology. With the exception of Exchange, ColdFusion isn’t as good as ASP.Net for that.
• Alright – some people don’t like proprietary solutions of any kind. At least we know they’re not using ASP.Net.

I think the ways in which ColdFusion can build inroads around these solution-needs are:

• More community support around the existing scaffolding solutions for ColdFusion
• More open source solutions written IN ColdFusion
• More Adobe support around proprietary interfaces that draw people away from ColdFusion.
• Acceptance of the fact that just because some people won’t buy proprietary solutions doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exist.

Notice “open source ColdFusion” wasn’t on that list. I don’t think it ever will be.

I don’t know which of the reasons holds the biggest opportunity for ColdFusion to gain market share. You’d need to do surveys and ask current and defecting customers a whole bunch of questions. That sounds like a job for the marketing department of Adobe. Hmmm. Didn’t Adobe add tags for getting information about database’s schema a little easier? Didn’t they fund RIAForge? Didn’t they add code for calling .NET assemblies and the CFExchange tags?

I think Adobe has already decided which customers they are going to go after. Right or wrong, they’ve stuck with selling their current solution, and tailoring it to get those three groups. I think what happens to Blue Dragon, ColdFusion, and market share will do a good job of sorting out who’s right here. I’m betting on Adobe.

Oh, why did I write “Ruby (on Rails)” everywhere? I get annoyed when people fail to understand the distinction between the language and the framework. That being said, I think that Ruby on Rails is the right thing to call the ColdFusion competitor, as it is the entire solution that attracts web developers to it, not just the language. As a further aside, I think the total solution that ColdFusion provides is the special sauce of ColdFusion, not just the language.