CFUnited Presentation Roudup

CFunited was busy for everyone involved so I have no excuse for falling behind in making blog entries as many others just as busy as I did kept up just fine. I'll only post 2 entries for CFUnited this one with all my presentations and then a second one recapping my CFUnited experience (spoiler: It kicked ass!). On with the recap!

Red Green Refactor
PDF Keynote

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to present this topic 2 times at the conference. I feel like both presentations were solid and entertaining; including a reference to old Purple Pants (if you do not know, probably best not to ask :) ). Barney B was disappointed in my lack of gratuitous vulgarity, I'll attempt to not let him down next year. I got really good feedback, even testimonial that TDD does speed up development!

Fusebox Past Present Future (Busy Developers Guide to Fusebox)
PDF Keynote

This was a bit awkward given the current situation surrounding Fusebox and Myself. The first half I did my best to sell on the framework and break down some of the old myths. At about 5:55 I entered my 5th Myth: Fusebox is Dead and instead of really getting into that I made the attendees aware of the current state (at the time) and announced I was resigning. I think spent the second half of the presentation talking about FuseNG (or Fork-a-doodle-doo). Expect more entries soon surrounding FuseNG 1.0 (code named Cuddles).

Code Review and Team Dynamics
PDF Keynote

This started my 3 hour marathon of presenting. It was also a late add to the conference, I was subbing for Jake Munson who was unable to present do to person reasons. I love this presentation, I've given it a few times previous. I felt really good about my delivery and I think everyone got something out of the presentation. I think I might create a new presentation on the same vein but with more emphasis on Team Dynamics and mentoring for next years conferences. I appreciate all the positive feedback from everyone!

Busy Developers Guide to Java Part 1
PDF Keynote

This was one of those presentations with so much content it has to go perfect or you run out of time. I screwed up 2 times and ran over. I was also called Drill Sgt. and Reverend after this presentation. Apparently I was too brash haha! I felt everyone still learn a great deal about java and I got some great positive feedback as well, definitely help enable folks in this one. This was the second session I got to repeat. The second iteration I tried not to preach as much I also pulled some content that might have been too preachy. I ended right on time and had some great interaction, just like the first time. I think this session has great replay potential for future conferences.

Busy Developers Guide to Java Part 2
PDF Keynote

This was my final presentation of the 3 hour presentation marathon. I'll admit that about halfway through the Part1 session I felt ill. This continued into part 2. About half ways through one of the most embarrassing things happened, I had to excuse myself from the presentation for a moment. Luckily this was the last session of the day and everyone was very understanding and allowed me to run over the time and finish the content. I appreciate everyone's patients with me. Aside from the total misery I was in as far as how I felt I think this presentation was awesome. I got good participation from the attendees and very positive feedback from many folks. Anytime I stick around after a session to answer additional probing questions seeking to learn more is awesome.

Overall I had a blast presenting. I hope everyone attending my presentations was entertained and learned or was motivate. As long as I was able to positively affected at least one individual that is all the more I can ask for as a presenter the rest is gravy. Our community is growing and I am glad to be part of the growth. Here's to CFUnited and any other conference that facilitates collaboration and growing! Thanks Stellr for organizing, promoting and kicking ass.

Code Review and Mentoring

I've had quite a few people ask about the presentation slides for my Code Review and Mentoring presentation at cfObjective. I've been intending to post them for a while and I keep getting distracted. I think this is one of my more enjoyable topics. I feel like sometimes technical how-tos are hard to cover in under an hour but Code Reviews and mentoring you can get a good bit of ideas across in an hour. I did not get to go on my Scrum rant this time but 50 minutes is 50 minutes. Thanks to all that attended and my appologies on the delay in my slides.

MVCFUG gets to listen to me Rant

With the successful launch of the MVCFUG I am excited to be able to provide content for a local UG. They've asked me to present there next month about Improving Code Quality. Some of you may remember I did a BOF at cfUnited that had a great turn out and this is the presentation that I was going to present at cfDevCon. Unfortunately, cfDevCon had to be canceled but I am excited to share the content stateside with a great group of developers. As an aside this one I think is planned for the evening so folks in Cincinnati should make a trip up, it's just Miamisburg. I am not sure that they are setup to do connect so please don't expect a connect presentation out of it. As with most of my presentations this one really focuses on how we can work together and produce high quality code. We'll most likely focus on peer design and peer reviews. When I say code quality I am not talking about using a structure or queryparam (that is not what a code review is for people!). Really I am not even talking about using CFCs (correctly or otherwise), though they can play into quality. I am talking about how we can work together to create maintainable software that has high fidelity. Talking about code quality is a very passionate subject and I can't wait to share my experiences with the Miami Valley folks!

Speaking at cfDevCon

Its an odd place to start my presentation tour (or I hope it becomes a tour) but I plan on submitting presentations to many conferences moving forward and cfDevCon will be my first presentation stop, though I did lead a BOF at cfunited. My topics, at cfDevCon, will not get you any further along with using your favorite framework and chances are you won't see a whole bunch of cool CFML code snippets either. I figure there are plenty others out there that can do that better than me, maybe in the future I will consider some of those topics. Instead I'll enjoy talking about topics that are applicable across languages, and really thats where my core focus lies these days. In my current role my programming has taken a back seat to my mentoring and training and honestly I spend some of my time with projects that are not even CFML based projects. Many of the concepts I will be presenting on are 100% applicable there too!

My first session will focus on automation, I am all about being lazy and ANT is a perfect way to enable my laziness. This session first started out as setting up a developer IDE and I quickly learned that each person has thier own way of doing things and trying to show just one way of doing it will leave attendees with only a specific solution that works well for me and my company. Instead I plan to focus more on how to use ANT as a tool to not only automate redundant tasks like builds and deploys, but how it can be in integral part of your daily development life cycle. We'll cover things like test driven development and working with mxUnit's ant tasks. We'll touch on how to attach builders to eclipse projects, how to write ANT tasks to run tests, and, inspired by Marc Esher, a good overview of ANT's general syntax. There is a lot of content to cover and it will be fast paced and example heavy. We'll dip into CFML for a short bit to show off mxUnit but most of the examples will be ANT scripts!

The second presentation (yep I have 2 at cfDevcon) will be all about improving code quality. We'll spend a good amount of time talking about code reviews, the different types, how to introduce them in your company and how to be success with conducting code reviews. Code reviews are only one aspect of quality improvement, additionally we'll take a look at mentoring (and how mentoring and code reviews intersect) and JAD sessions. Improving quality is 100% language agnostic, if you have Flex, Java, CFML or .Net background come and check it out, everyone can learn something. If you are already successful with code reviews or mentoring come and share your ideas we'll have plenty discussion points so everyone can share! I'm really looking forward to sharing my success and failures with folks through my presentations, if anyone ever has topics they would like covered let me know I am always looking for other ideas for exciting topics to explore.

cfUnited BoF

I wanted to thank everyone that attended my BOF at cfunited. I had a great time sharing my experiences and leading a GREAT conversation with all of my peers. The BOF was only a success thanks to the endless participation from the audience. If you enjoyed the BOF you might be interested to know I have a tentative plan to present this type of material at some conferences in the future (maybe even cfunited 09???). Nothing for sure yet but I am working on the possibility. As promised here is the mind map. I will try to capture some of the conversation and more on this Mind map in future posts, maybe when I am running on more than 4.5 hours of sleep!!

If you click the image it will get bigger.