Objective Bias

My last blog post was mainly about how valuable conferences can be for networking and socializing with other developers. I had promised myself to attend one of the "big two" conferences next year (CFUnited or CFObjective). Well, we all know what happened to CFUnited since my last blog post (wow – has it been that long?). In the aftermath of the "death" of CFUnited, many people in the community have pointed to the state of the economy and companies have had to cut back on their conference budgets. With airfare, hotel and registration fees, one can easily spend up to $2000 attending one of these conferences (as a freelancer who has to pay his own way, that has been one of the reasons I have yet to attend). Another aspect of this discussion has the rise of smaller, shorter, regional conferences, such as NCDevCon, D2W, BFusion/BFlex, and RIA Unleashed. These low-cost (sometimes free) conferences can be a great value because many of them also include hands-on training workshops in addition to the standard sessions.

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Given the title of this post, I admit that the timing is a bit off, but I’ve had this post "in the can" for a while and felt like I needed to get this out.
Due to budget and time constraints (yet again), I actually wasn’t able to attend CFObjective() this year. However, I was able to manage flying out to Minneapolis for the "Programmers Guide to Mura CMS" pre-conference training put on by Blue River Interactive.

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I know it's been very quiet here of late. I have a list of things I want to blog about, but between family time and client projects, it's been easy to put blogging low on the priority list. However, I have resolved to start managing my time to make more room for blogging and start crossing things off that list.

Two projects in particular (which I hope to be able to blog about soon) have been taking up a lot of my development time. One has me heavily into Mura CMS plugin development, and for the other I've been working with Railo CFC-based custom tags. I've been learning so much about both, so I have decided to submit a couple of topics for the upcoming CFUnited Conference.

CFUnited has opened topic voting to the public, so if you're interested in any of my topics, just go the the voting page and search for topics by Tony Garcia. There were a couple of other submissions on Mura plugin development, but I think I was the only one who had a topic on the CFC-based custom tags. It would be an incredible honor for me to speak at the conference, and I'll try my hardest to make it worth your while if I get to speak! Thanks!

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From all the blog posts on the subject, it seems like CFUnited was an awesome conference this year. Unfortunately I was unable to go. However, all is not lost. Brian Rinaldi has put together what is looking to be an amazing one-day conference on November 13 -- RIA Unleashed: Boston!

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I just registered for the jQuery Camp 2008, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts on September 28, which I found out about from Rey Bango's blog. I've started using a sprinkling of jQuery recently, and just from that I'm understanding what the hype is all about. So it's time to get a bit more serious about it. I've recently started working through the Learning jQuery book, so hopefully I'll be a bit less green by conference time. Hopefully, I'll bump into more than a few CF'ers. Who knows --- maybe if you just register, I'll see you there!