Brian Kotek:
Inversion of Control

Hi folks, I just wanted to drop a note that I'll be speaking at the cf.Objective() and CFUnited conferences again in 2010. Both of these are fantastic conferences, so if you can attend, I highly recommend going!

At cf.Objective(), my first session is "Don't Let OO Drag You Down: A Pragmatic Approach to OO Design and Development". My goal here will be to focus on some specific elements of OO development that I feel offer the most "bang for the buck". These are the ideas that I can't live without, even on a small project. The second session is "The Swiz Framework", where I'll talk about, what else, the Swiz framework for Flex and AS3. We'll look at how it works and what is being added for the 1.0 release.

Meanwhile, at CFUnited, my session is "Clean Code: Why It Matters and How It's Done". Here, I'd like to look at a range of concepts that affect code clarity, including layout, comments, method and class names, file organization, and more. I'll also touch on some "code smells", or indicators that something may be amiss. For now, that is my only confirmed topic, but I believe one more will be added as further topics are announced.

I hope to see you there! You'll find me speaking, listening in the sessions, and enjoying beers in the bar with my fellow code junkies. :-)

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I've uploaded my CFinNC presentations to SlideSix for anyone who's interested:

Object-Oriented Design Principles

Introduction to Swiz

Overall, CFinNC was great. I actually had to work for a large chunk of the weekend so aside from presenting and mingling with folks later in the evening, I didn't get to attend many other sessions. That said, everything looked top-notch while I was there. The conference unfolded very smoothly and all of the attendees seemed very engaged. Hats off to Dan Wilson and the entire volunteer team for pulling this off! This conference definitely held its own against the other CF conferences I've attended. It was very difficult to tell that it was completely free. Hopefully we can do it again next year!

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Just a quick note that I'll be speaking at the CFinNC conference on October 17-18th here in Raleigh, NC. My topics are Object-oriented Design Principles and The Swiz Framework for Flex.

The conference is FREE and the lineup is very impressive, so if you can attend, please register! And if you register, please actually show up! The danger with a free conference is that it's easy for folks to back out at the last minute, since they lose nothing. But for the organizers, it makes estimating actual attendance difficult. So if you sign up, please do your best to make it. :-)

I'm looking forward to seeing some folks that I normally have to wait until MAX or next year's CFObjective or CFUnited conferences to see. And I hope to meet a lot of new people as well. See you in Raleigh!

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It's been a while since I've blogged, as you might guess I've been really busy. I do plan to dive back into blogging again after the conference, both here and at the Alagad blog. But right now my focus is on wrapping up some tasks so that my time at CFUnited is used to it's full potential!

I'm presenting on Friday on Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling and Design. I've tweaked the presentation a bit since I gave it last, based partly on the podcast that Hal, Ben Nadel and I did a few weeks ago. If you're interested in what helps make "good" OO design, I hope the presentation will be helpful. Again, let me point out that the presentation isn't an introduction to OO, I'm assuming attendees already understand what a class is, what an object is, etc. This presentation is talking about OO at a more general level, in terms of how sets of objects actually work together.

My tentative schedule for the conference is attached to this entry, so if you'd like to chat about OO, CF, Flex, Groovy, or just about anything else, feel free to catch up with me. I'll also most likely be a regular at any evening gatherings at the hotel bar. ;-)

Anyway, I hope to see you this week in DC! Until then!

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I'm a bit late with this, but better late than never! In my defense, the last few weeks have been pretty crazy with the conference arriving and joining Alagad. I'll be posting to the Alagad Team Blog going forward as well, but I'll do my best to keep that focused on interesting things learned on work projects, and keep my personal blog for covering my own thoughts, personal code experiments, and updates to my RIAForge projects.

With that said, let's talk CF.Objective(). Overall, the conference was excellent, which wasn't really surprising all! :-) The networking and hallway/dinner/bar discussions were always insightful. I got to see a number of friends whom I unfortunately only catch up with at conferences, like Chris Scott, Peter Bell, Barney Boisvert, and Mark Mandel. It's one thing to have email and IM chats, but quite another to be able to bounce ideas around over beers for 3 hours!

I attended several good sessions, like the Mate Framework (even though I'm a Swiz fan, Mate is pretty sweet), ColdBox, and Test Driven Development. Unfortunately, I missed the opening keynote in place of sleeping in, since my flight was delayed and I didn't get in until about 3 am and I was speaking at 10 am.

Speaking of...speaking, I did give two presentations, one on OO Modeling and Design, and one on Open-Source Enterprise Java and CF. I thought both went pretty well, though I had more time to prepare for the OO talk. I finished a bit early on the Java talk, but the Q&A session was full of interesting discussion, so all in all I think it was good. If you did see me speak, PLEASE fill out the session survey forms: OO Modeling and Design and Open-Source Enterprise Java and CF. I really do read what people have to say and try to use it to improve my future presentations!

Anyway, next stop should be CFUnited! Hopefully I'll see many of the same folks there, as well as some friends who couldn't make it to Minneapolis, and any new folks who'd like to talk (if it's geeky, just about anything goes!)

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