CFUNITED actually ended a couple weeks ago, I just never got around to posting anything on my return. So here I am a few weeks later, and thought I would drop a couple lines about my impressions of the conference.

CFUNITED is like the no-nonsense ColdFusion training and networking conference of the year. It was great to attend 4+ packed days days of sessions and have them all relate to my core business - ColdFusion. This is a task that I think is going to be hard to accomplish at the upcoming Adobe MAX conference in October, and with the increasing price of MAX, it will be harder to justify its worth. Whereas I am left being completely satisfied with CFUNITED and getting my money's worth out of it.

While I don't have the time to go into details of each session and what I got out of them, I can say that I was mostly very happy with all my selections. I had a few sessions where if I had read the agenda better I would have not taken them, as I was mis-lead by the session title. For example: Sean Corfield gave a presso called "Objects and Persistence". I thought, "Oh that's great, I need to learn the proper way to call my CFCs and have them persist in memory while my application is being used. I bet I am not taking advantage of the best practices and loading my CFCs too many times into memory when I could be reusing them". Well, I was dead wrong. The true nature of the session was that "Persistence" is your database (because memory is volatile and cleared for various reasons), and Sean discussed how you can interact with your database through objects like beans, and DAO's. Stuff that while nice and maybe I should be using, does not apply to my immediate situation. None the less good stuff.

I mentioned before that the conference was about networking... while there I met 2 other Boise, ID based ColdFusion developers. One of them was a presenter on a session I took, and so I invited him to this month's Boise ColdFusion user group meeting and he came. I guess he was a member many moon's ago but stopped coming. I met other great people from all over the country as well.

I am definitely looking forward to next year's conference. One great thing about CFUNITED is that developers are the people presenting, and so I plan on submitting my own topics to present on next year. There was one session I attended on the Asynchronous Gateway in CFMX, and I think the topic could have been presented on much better to show how to take advantage of it. I am already writing my session agenda and sample code in my head. So hopefully I will have a presso or two selected so I can contribute next year.