Objective Bias

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. The training was really excellent. A lot of info was packed into the time we had. I’m not sure how much I would've gotten out of it if I was a truly green beginner with Mura, but for those of us who have worked with if for a while, Matt Levine and the rest of the Blue River crew did a great job on all of the great features that have been added recently. Mura has really come a long way since it was released as Sava a couple of years ago.

It was also great to meet the Blue River team in person (finally): Matt, Sean Schroeder, Eddie Ballisty, Pat Santora, and Jason Long. Not only was it evident that they are very passionate about Mura and the CF community, but they’re also just a great bunch of guys who are fun to have a few beers and shoot the shit with.

Anyway the training was held the day before CFObjective() was to start. So all day, the conference attendees (some of who I recognized) were trickling into the hotel. And that night after the training was the kickoff "mixer" event. Turns out that Blue River was sponsoring the event and they were gracious enough to let me crash it (hopefully I'm not getting anyone in trouble for this). It was so cool to meet and mingle with people from the community who I've only previously interacted with on the interwebs such as Steve Withington (who was at the Mura training as well), Jamie Krug, Sean Corfield, Luis Majano, Rob Brooks-Bilson, Ben Nadel, John Mason, and Dan Vega. And it was also great to see some people again who I'd met before at other events like Marc Esher, Ray Camden, Gert Franz, and Shannon Hicks.

The next morning I had to catch an early flight back to Boston, but my little taste of CFObjective() really let me experience what I've always heard was the best part of these conferences – the social interaction, networking, and shop talk with some really smart, passionate, and friendly members of the web development community. The experience really has motivated me to make it a priority to attend at least one of the major CF conferences next year – either CFUnited or CFObjective() (although CFFringe is also looking mighty interesting). I definitely won't miss this year's RIA Unleashed (which is local to me) on November 11 and 12. This year, Brian Rinaldi has expanded it to be a 2-day event, so I'm pretty excited about it (more socializing/networking), and yes, Brian, I'll definitely help out like last year.