Scotch on the Rocks

ColdFusion conference, May 24 2010, London

This was definitely a new and weird experience for me — attending and speaking at a ColdFusion conference, about HTML5 and CSS3! I had a lot of fun playing around with ColdFusion around a decade ago, but since then (after getting into all things front end, and shying away from server-side experimentation) I don't think I'd even heard the word uttered more than a handful of times. Until last year that is, when I met some ColdFusion developers at a conference in Australia, and they filled me in on the underground phenomenon of ColdFusion's popularity in Enterprise and Government.

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And now I get invited to speak at a <cfconference> (see? getting into it already.) When I got there it was nice to chat to some familiar faces from the Flash world, like Aral Balkan, John Davey and Mike Jones. I also met some new people, like organisers Andy (Allan) and Matt (Gifford). In short, I had a great time. The CF folk are just as passionate and driven as the rest of us webbies, and they made me feel very welcome.

I watched an Adobe CF keynote and a talk on AIR application development using CF, which I didn't understand much of but found very interesting. It was then time for my talk — I really wasn't sure how it would go down, but the organisers assured me that HTML5 was a very requested topic at this conference. I was pleased to see that the room was absolutely packed (about 200), and people asked some really good questions all the way through. I had plenty of opportunities to plug Opera throughout, and my book, and my educational initiatives! I spent a good few hours afterwards talking to people about HTML5 and CSS3.

After lunch, I hung around to watch Aral Balkan's fantastic talk on emotional user experience (the guy is a fantastic, really engaging speaker!), and then I said my goodbyes, as I wasn't feeling too well, and wanted to drop by the London web standards meetup quickly to say hi to Henny Swan and Chris Magro, Jim O'Donnell, Ian Pouncey, Jeff Van Campen, and others, before heading back off to Manchester. A great time was had by all!