Tag: Web Development

Knowledge@Wharton scored an interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. I think there’s a lot of great content in the article. The article is mostly concerned with Air, but the part I liked best is where the interviewer asks the question I’ve been wondering about for awhile chiefly:

Knowledge@Wharton: The AIR run time is available as a free download. The AIR Software Development Kit is available for free. How does Adobe make any money from this technology?

Kevin goes on to answer, read the whole article for his exact answer, but basically it comes down to the fact that Adobe uses it’s free products as a loss leader to encourage purchases of their other technologies including tooling and servers. He specifically includes ColdFusion in that.

I think this is another pointer to the fact that Adobe probably won’t be open sourcing or making free ColdFusion anytime in the near future. That might change if OpenBD and Railo gain any sort of traction. But I’m betting against them, as I have said before.

Inspired as I am by Rob Brooks-Bilson’s posts, I’m putting this out there:

I want a cfvideo tag for Centaur that is akin to the cfimage tag in terms of usage and abilities. I want to be able to crop, cut, manipulate, and codec video. I want to be able to easily make Flash Video content from our content.

I posit that video isn’t what’s next for web developers, it is what is.

I wanted to get that in before I hear what anything about the next version of ColdFusion.

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.

It was with great sadness and dehydration with which I faced the final day at cf.Objective 2008.

Due to my state of “sadness” I didn’t really start taking in new information until Joe Rinehart’s talk on Model-Glue 3: Back to its Roots. Model-Glue 2 broke me of my resistance to frameworks, it made me willing to use them. Model-Glue 3 just makes me want to use Model-Glue 3. I really like seeing things being brought in from the RoR writing process. (Ask for something, a shell gets created, then modify it.) I can’t wait until it’s more documented and ready to go, as I can’t consider myself an expert Model-Glue user.

Then I wandered into Mike Brunt’s session on Clustering and Distributing ColdFusion Applications. I really wanted to hear Mike talk, because he is one of the few public voices on server administration in the community. I admit, I think my brain is full. But I can’t really think it, because my brain is full. I did like the tip to use the default install of ColdFusion in multiserver as an admin node.

Despite that, I went to Jason Delmore’s Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java. I got a lot out of this session when he gave it a few years ago at MAX. It’s definitely geeky stuff for people who want to know how things are running under the covers. But this type of knowledge is really great to have when you are trying to figure out what’s going on when your application misbehaves. The part about String buffers was worth the entire session. If you deal with large string operations, take a longer look at this if the presentation comes out. I need to implement this stuff immediately.

Finally the closing section was a nice ending beat to the conference. It impresses me just how much passion the people in the room have to this niche of the professional world.

This is one of those things that’s probably a pet peeve of mine because I use to do it myself, but I figured I would share what I was told during my performance days.

I’ve seen this phenomenon a bunch, a performer or presenter gets done, an audience member comes up and says something along the lines of “Great job,” the complimented responds with something like:

• “Oh I totally screwed up”
  
• “No, I didn’t really do anything”
  
• “No, I thought it went awfully”
  

Invariably there are two things that drive this:

1. The presenter/performer is so caught up in their own self examination, that they are being hyper critical and sharing it with the complementer.

2. The presenter/performer is concerned about the appearance of humility.

Both ignore a greater truth in the interaction: Someone has said something nice to you, and you are immediately telling them they are wrong! Even if they don’t directly perceive this, it can leave them with a bad taste in their mouth.

So what do you do? Say “Thank you,” that’s it. Leave the self examination stuff where it belongs, in your head. If you are concerned with your ego, accept and expand the compliment: “Thank you; I have to say the audience was really great, you guys asked really great questions.”

It’s a silly little thing, but it can have a big impact on how you are perceived.

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