Monday 01 August 2011
A while ago Steve Bryant came up with the excellent idea of August 1st being designated How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day, for which ColdFusion users tell their origin story. As a big fan of encouraging others to take up coding, I thought I'd bring my story to the table. Let's start right back at the beginning...
Tuesday 08 March 2011
After three non-stop days of travel, keynotes, sessions, and networking, Scotch on the Rocks is now over for another year. The quality of the speakers this year was first class, and that coupled with an excellent venue and a brilliant community made for what I consider to be the best Scotch yet.
The conference was held at the Apex International Hotel in Edinburgh, and with the majority of attendees staying either in the International or its neighbouring sister hotel the Apex City it ensured that there was always a large contingent of people to chat to at any time of the day or night. A step up from last year's London-based TigerTiger venue, the International allowed the conference to take over several main areas of the hotel, and this resulted in an event which felt like it flowed better than previous years despite the limitation of smaller rooms such as 'Starscream'. Thank you to all of the Apex staff for looking after us and for providing excellent tea and muffins in particular. Just one request - please get someone to look at the internet access before several hundred wifi-crazy attendees descend on you again next year! Conference organisers Fuzzy Orange did another great job, so many thanks to Andy, Matt and Leanne for all of their hard work.
It's all very well to feel that the conference was a great success, but it was great to see that feeling being backed up by some stats in the closing speech. Despite the recent economic hard times attendance was up, there was a great spread of visitors from the UK, Europe and beyond, and 48% were first time Scotch attendees. Most interestingly, 14% of attendees were completely new to ColdFusion, which was likely helped by the drive to encourage more university students to attend by offering free tickets.
Friday 25 February 2011
As I'll be attending Scotch on the Rocks (Europe's premier ColdFusion-based conference) next week, this weekend will be all about getting ready for the long voyage from the safety of Kent to the wilds of Edinburgh.
If you're anything like me, conferences will be booked up months in advance and will rapidly descend on you when you're completely booked up with a sea of various other things to think about. For my own future reference, as well as for anyone travelling to conferences or other business-related gatherings, here's my preparation checklist.
Thursday 17 February 2011
I'm very proud to be able to say that I have been accepted as an Adobe Community Professional for 2011. It's a big honour to be included into the ranks alongside people that I respect an incredible amount, so I'd like to say a massive thank you to Adobe, and to the individual that recommended me for inclusion in the first place.
This year there are only 234 ACPs worldwide, with an additional 87 ACCs. The full list can be seen here: http://blogs.adobe.com/community/2011/01/adobe-community-professionals-2011.html. Big congratulations to all of my fellow ACPs and ACCs.
2011 has already been a big year of change for me, and we're only a month in! I'm looking to be a lot more active in the community, and as mentioned previously that's one of the reasons for this blog. Here's hoping that this is just the start of many more exciting community adventures for the rest of the year.
Head of Technology @ Lightmaker UK, based in Colchester, Essex, in England. I blog (infrequently) about various industry observations. All opinions are my own, and not those of my employer.
