The final day of cf.Objective() 2012 offers five slots of sessions plus the closing remarks. Often times with conferences, it feels like the last day gets a bit of the shaft, with the least favorite sessions pushed there because so many folks bail out before the conference ends. I was therefore happy to find that other than the pre-lunch slot, I was able to find something to go to throughout the day and, for the most part, it was all useful info. Yay!
- Less CSS, Meet ColdFusion – Nathan Strutz
- This session was alternately frustrating and very interesting. On the whole, I walked away feeling like LESS CSS might be worth looking into and could do some cool things, but it was an aggravating journey. It was clear Nathan knew his topic but he kind of forgot to explain what LESS CSS was. He did give lots of code examples, though they were at the start (which were interest piquing for sure) before he explained how you actually use this stuff. I was able to follow along and eventually figured it out, though I'm still not sure I really understood about how to compile it all. Still the basic idea sounds interesting (pseudo-programmable CSS!) so I'll be looking into it more.
- Authentication Made Easy Using Twitter, Facebook, Google, and More – Billy Cravens
- Billy certainly wasn't kidding when he talked about making it look easy. Wow! I always figured such stuff would be ridiculously complicated. He gave a great overview of the various options with OpenID and oAuth, along with demonstrations. The only minor negative for me is I have no particular real world application for it myself, but at least now if the need arises I'll be much more ready to go for it 🙂
- Enterprise Search with ColdFusion Solr – Dan Sirucek
- Dear Dan, thank you for making me love Solr 🙂 Seriously, we have a few apps using Verity so of course we were excited to hear about Solr, but actually getting to see how to do it and how to go way beyond just what ColdFusion ships with was very useful, as was his details on how to set up master/slaves.
- Making High-Performance Caching Easy with ColdFusion – Brian Klass
- I was a bit leery of this one after the second day's similar session, but I'm so so glad I went! Besides actually explaining what EhCache was, Brian went through how to use the new caching features of CF 9 (as well as some CF10 stuff), how to avoid misusing them, and ways to help decide when and what to cache. This session had me so excited not only because it will of great use in our work applications once we finish migrating to CF9, but because it solved a problem I'd be wrestling with that was delaying the launch of the redo of my personal site, An Eclectic World. That night I put what I'd learned into practice and danced around my hotel in giddiness at the crazy performance boost. I suspect if I'd been to this one before the second day's caching one, I might have understood the second day one's just a little bit better.
The closing remarks were, well, closing remarks LOL. Adorable little girl recruited to help give away raffle goodies (we won nothing) and then cf.Objective() 2012 was officially over. We did make an attempt at being social this day, with my partner trying to recruit folks on Twitter to join us for dinner but no one seemed to respond (and Twitter really sucks for actual conversation, IMHO). With that, this year's conference was done for us. We left for home the next morning and bid Minneapolis a fond fair thee well. Hopefully we'll be visiting again next year!