Submit Your Questions for Pud!

As we mentioned before we're thrilled to have Pud joining us remotely for a talk at OpenCF Summit, and rather than do a traditional talk he suggested an interview format, which we think will be a great way to pick his brain.

We of course have a ton of questions to ask the infamous Internet entrepreneur, but we also want to hear from you! Even if you can't be there in person feel free to submit questions by commenting on this post, and we'll ask as many as we can.

If you don't know how Pud relates to CFML, check out his great "Why Must You Laugh At My Back End" blog post.

Giveaways Galore!

OpenCF Summit starts this Friday so to get attendees and Hackfest participants pumped up, here's a quick list of some of what you might win as an OpenCF Summit participant! We're extremely grateful for all our fantastic sponsors for making these giveaways possible.

Hackfest Prizes

The Hackfest is generously sponsored by MasterCard so the top two prizes for Hackfest participation are MasterCard gift cards in the amounts of $250 and $100.

In addition, to encourage participation in the Hackfest if you commit only one line of code to the Enlist project on GitHub, you'll be eligible to win a Kindle Fire and a $100 MasterCard gift card.

Attendee Giveaways

All attendees are eligible to win various prizes including:

• Three Cartweaver 4 licenses


• Three certificates for six months of free VPS hosting at Vivio Technologies

... and a ton of other stuff!

We'll see you in Dallas later this week! And if you're STILL not registered, go do it now!

Matt & Jason talk OpenCF Summit on gov2.0radio!

OpenCF Summit isn't just about pushing the CFML envelope.

It's also about growing our community by attracting people and ideas from other communities.

Listen to Matt and Jason pitch CFML to the Gov 2.0 community, explaining that:

• It's Free & Open Source.


• You can write it in tags or in an ECMAscript-style syntax.


• Still pretty ubiquitous in Gov't - handy if you're trying to befriend Gov't technies.


• Hard to beat for Rapid Application Development - handy for quick Civic apps.


• Great "gateway" language between the Gov 2.0 and Java communities.


• The perfect language for Activists getting into Hacktivism.


• Loads of sophisticated and Open Source frameworks and tooling.


• Backed by a vibrant and friendly community.


• Powerful.  Charting, document-generation, video, mail, caching, scalability, cloud hosting - from quick turn-arounds to gluing the enterprise together, Railo and OpenBD have you covered.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/btrplayer.swf

Listen to internet radio with Gov20Radio on Blog Talk Radio

OpenCF Summit Speaker Interview - Alex Skinner

Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Alex Skinner!

Alex Skinner is the Co-founder/Managing Director of Pixl8, a mid-size web development agency with offices in London and Kuala Lumpur. He holds a degree in Business Information Systems from the University of Portsmouth.

 

OpenCF Summit: Hey Alex!  So tell us about yourself.

Alex: I've been working with ColdFusion since version 4.0 (1999) when I was gifted a not-for-resale copy from the fine folks at Allaire to use for my dissertation.  I have been working with CF ever since University, first teaching the official Allaire curriculum as well as consulting around ColdFusion, particularly focusing on performance tuning and troubleshooting. I've been running Pixl8 since 2001 and oversee a team of 10 Coldfusion developers who all work with a Non-Adobe CFML platform day-to-day, since 2005.  We build an enterprise CMS, Intranet product and a number of SAAS products using CFML goodness.

 

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Alex:  Development environment OSX, Windows 7 and Linux with Eclipse
Servers: Centos Linux with HaProxy, VarnishCache, MySQL
Window 2008 R2 with IIS and OpenBluedragon

 

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Alex: My main experience with open source has been with MySQL and Linux and obviously Open Bluedragon. I also am a fan of mixing open source with commerical offerings, hence the Linux for load balancers and caching, Windows for webservers and Linux MySQL for the backend.

I switched from Coldfusion Studio direct to CFEclipse, as I never liked the tools on offer in between.

 

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Alex:  I want to see real innovation stuff that makes you go oooohhh nice. Things that are huge time savers comparative to other languages - think CFQUERY.

"CFML community" is a funny description. People are not interested in genuine debate around the state of the language or advancing it as a platform and it descends into battles over my favourite engine.  So I'm happy to just contribute to OpenBD and keep my head down as well as dive in when i read something i don't like :).

 

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Alex: Sessions that are meaningful and offer the opportunity to learn something.  Looking forward to have some genuinely interesting discussions and meeting some bright people.

 

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Alex: I'll be doing a joint presentation with Alan Williamson discussing how we both use OpenCFML platforms to run our businesses. Plus any other sessions I get roped into.

 

Come talk shop with Alex at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

OpenCF Summit Speaker Interview - Joseph Lamoree

Next up in our OpenCF Summit speaker interviews: Joseph Lamoree!

Joseph Lamoree is a software developer from Southern California, working primarily with ColdFusion for many years. Blog posts on CFML and technology in general at lamoree.com.

 

OpenCF Summit: Hey Joseph!  So tell us about yourself.

Joseph: I started using CFML in 1996 with Allaire Cold Fusion 2.0 to build intranet web applications. Since then, I've used each new version of the ColdFusion application server, as well as Open BlueDragon and Railo. I created cflucene, cfdns, and a handful of enhancements to existing open source projects.

 

OpenCF Summit: What does your development environment look like?

Joseph:  Over the years, I've used a variety of platforms and tools. I prefer to develop using a Mac OS X machine with TextMate or CFEclipse, and deploy to CentOS running Railo. I wouldn't consider creating a new application these days that isn't based on a framework such as Mach-II or ColdBox. I do a bit of work in Java, and admit that I have a special fondness for clever Perl one-liners and handy shell scripts.

 

OpenCF Summit: What is your experience with Open Source Software? Where do you see OSS going?

Joseph: I try to contribute to open source projects whenever I can, and (almost) always use OSS over commercial products. There is a tremendous diversity in open source; licenses to fit nearly every situation and projects fitting nearly every need. I would like to be more active in social coding sharing solutions.

 

OpenCF Summit: Where do you think CFML is heading these days? How would you characterize the state of the CFML community?

Joseph:  I don't engage the "your language is dead" trolls or keep up with the surveys of active CFML developer numbers. For me, it's a perfect balance between rapid development and solid engineering practice. Every month there improvements and enhancements to CFML created by the two open engines, and I'm certain Adobe's next release will be a fine product. I don't fear that the code I write today won't be perfectly usable for many years to come.

 

OpenCF Summit: Why are you excited about OpenCF Summit?

Joseph: I really enjoyed the conference last year, and I'm sure this year's will be even better. The session topics are interesting and useful, with a focus on openness that I appreciate greatly.

 

OpenCF Summit: One last question: could you tell us a little about what you'll be speaking on?

Joseph: My session will be on taking advantage of current tools to quickly and automatically build, test, and deploy CFML applications. I will demonstrate a complete team workflow from development environment to production server done correctly every time.

 

Come talk shop with Joseph at OpenCF Summit February 24-26, 2012 and watch this space for more speaker interviews!

Updates and Additions to Schedule

Some minor updates to our day 1 schedule:

• Railo training will be a half-day in the morning as opposed to a full day


• Due to their travel schedule the Mura training on day 1 unfortunately had to be canceled


• Unconference gets one of the ballrooms ALL DAY so get your presentations ready!

We've also added the lightning talks to the schedule and we'll be joined virtually by Pud on Sunday! (More on that soon.)

Top Ten Reasons to attend @OpenCFSummit 2012!

1. $72 for 72 hours of Open Source, CFML, Gov 2.0, hackfestivities, lightening talk and unconference goodness.  ...Sleep optional.


2. Special greeting during keynote from ColdFusion co-founder Jeremy Allaire, now Chairman & CEO of Brightcove.


3. Philip Kaplan (@pud) is going to Google+ Hangout with us.


4. Free Railo, Open BlueDragon, Mach-II training.


5. Hackfest contributing to Code for America Brigade's Code Across America: A Week of Civic Innovation.
   


6. 2011 GovFresh Public Servant of the Year Matthew Esquibel


7. The infamous "Future of CFML BOF"! [cue suspenseful music]
   


8. Dan Martin, Community Manager - OpenAPI, MasterCard Worldwide on Open Disruption.


9. Tim O'Reilly thought it worth tweeting!


10. A different CFML conference format focused on an intense, intimate, collaborative learning experience, with a single session track, and plenty of space to be share in lightening talks, BOF's and unconference space.