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.

Since I live in the Boston area, it's a no-brainer that I'll be attending RIAUnleashed on November 11 and 12. The conference is organized by Brian Rinaldi who, after putting together several successful Flex Camp events, launched the inaugural RIAUnleashed conference last year as a 1-day event. This year, he has expanded it to 2 days – the first day will consist of half-day hands-on training workshops (so each attendee can attend a morning and an afternoon workshop) and the second day will consist of sessions for Flex, ColdFusion, and other general development/UX topics. Also – just because it's a smaller conference doesn't mean that there will be any shortage of "big names" from the community. Among the speakers this year will be Raymond Camden, Adam Lehman, Todd Sharp, Marc Esher, Terry Ryan, Simon Free, Bob Silverberg, and many others.

I'm particularly looking forward to Bob Silverberg's ColdFusion ORM workshop. I've recently started to experiment with the ORM features in CF9 and the Railo BER. But I'm aware that there's much more to fully taking advantage of this feature than initially meets the eye and it will be great to get my hands dirty with someone like Bob who has really gone farther with ORM than merely kicking the tires.

One session that I'm really looking forward to is Marc Esher's talk on Mongo DB. I've really been curious about this whole noSQL thing and getting clear on where it's appropriate to use instead of a traditional RDBMS. Plus, Marc is such a great speaker and an all around cool dude.

So, if you're anywhere in New England, there’s no reason you shouldn’t go. And even if you have to travel a bit, you should seriously consider it. BTW, Brian is running a contest where you can win a free pass! You can register for one of the two days or both days and there are still some early bird tickets available. So what are you waiting for – register now!