CFCamp 2019, the longest-running CFML conference in Europe (and now the only CFML conference in Europe), was held at the Munich Airport Marriott Hotel, Freising, Germany on 17th-18th October 2019.
I have been attending this incredible conference since 2012, and every year it continues to grow. Venues are switched when it needs more room for attendees, and, for the second year in a row, the event was held at the Marriott Hotel, although this year in the bigger presentation rooms available given the higher numbers.
The biggest thing I love about CFCamp is that it feels like a family reunion once a year. I’ve probably said and tweeted that sentence too much, but it honestly does.
I LOVE @cf_camp. I say this every year, but it really does feel like a family reunion. #cfml #coldfusion
— Matt Gifford (@coldfumonkeh) October 16, 2019
From the moment you arrive you feel at home, and then you start seeing the familiar faces, which naturally brings on the hugs and welcoming smiles as everyone is so familiar and friendly.
The schedule was filled with two tracks over the two days and each session was worth seeing, although as I still haven’t perfected the art of cloning yet I was not able to see them all.
Below is a outline of sessions I attended.
Day 1
The first day kicked off with the welcome message from organiser and CFCamp legend, Michael Hnat.
9:20am and it was time for the opening keynote from Gert and Micha covering Lucee, the Lucee Association, and Lucee 6. There are so many awesome new features coming in Lucee 6 that will streamline development and make things easier. I’m very excited.
I skipped the second slot of the day as I was finishing off some presentation updates and grabbing a coffee.
11:45am was my talk, “An in-depth introduction to Vue.js”.
I had a fairly big room and most of the seats were filled, which was nice to see. All of the attendees were fantastic and I had a few questions to answer after the session was complete; normally a good sign that people were engaged and wanted to know more.
After lunch (which is ALWAYS incredible in Munich), it was time to sit in on Mark Drew’s talk “Deploying and Testing your sites with Bitbucket”. As Mark and I work together the content covered the process we use, but it’s still always nice to get a breakdown of how everything pieces together.
I had to take a call and complete some work the session after that, but at 15:30 I was in Rob Dudley’s talk “A Comedy of Errors… in Web App Security”. Rob’s a great speaker and VERY knowledgable when it comes to security.
16:25 and I was listening to a talk from Maciej Treder called “Asynchronous and synchronous code. There and back again”. I used promises, and I love using them.
After another coffee break it was time to listen once more to Gert Franz with “Distributing Teams: No Kid-ing!” about how DistroKid managed to move from a one-man development team to a remote distributed team running agile sprints. Needless to say, I’m very passionate about the DistroKid work and love every aspect of it, so I wanted to attend this one.
Dinner at 18:15 immediately after, and then I helped Mark and Rob set up the main room for their CODEMASTERS quiz show. Guust Nieuwenhuis and I ended up in the quiz show again to defend our winning title from last year, this time against the U.S. might of Charlie Arehart and Nolan Erck. CODEMASTERS is always a lot of fun and the audience seemed to enjoy it.
Day 2
Day 2, sadly, is always quieter given the beer the night before.
Elishia Dvorak kicked off at 9am with the Adobe ColdFusion Keynote and some information about future releases.
10:20am and I was in Seb Duggan’s talk “A REST API in under 5 minutes with Preside”. This was a great talk. I use Preside on some projects, and I was very impressed with how clean, clear and quick the API management aspect is when using the built-in data objects.
13:00 I attended Eleftheria Batsou’s talk on “How To Design With Your User’s Needs & Expectations In Mind”. Her slides were beautiful, and the content was good in terms of user experience, something sadly a lot of developers don’t always consider.
13:55 and it was time to listen to Mr Rob Dudley again and “Go passwordless with FIDO2”. Yubico, one of the sponsors, once again gave every attendee a Yubikey (version 5, I think), so it was nice to see how this can be used for every day use as well as in a web-app.
15:00 and off to see Brad Wood wax lyrical about “Design Patterns: Common Solutions to Common Problems”. As always, Brad was fun, entertaining and knowledgeble, breaking down common design patterns into a brief but easy to understand format.
Sadly I had to get my taxi back to the airport directly after Brad’s talk and so I missed the final session slot and closing remarks.
Recap
If you have never been to CFCamp before, I highly recommend it.
There were around 120 session proposals submitted. The final schedule was selected from those submissions by the steering committee without knowing who the sessions were submitted by or who would give the talk. As a result, we had ten new speakers this year, which was fantastic.
CFCamp continues to grow every year and I’m sure next year will be no different. I really am excited to attend in 2020. A huge thanks to Michael Hnat for organising yet another immensely successful conference. A huge thanks also needs to go out to the steering committee for this year, who selected the sessions and helped to ensure things were running smoothly.