I'm a few days behind, but I thought I'd just share how darn impressed I was with this year's cfObjective. I was honored to be a speaker (in a session, in the keynote, and in a very frightening lightning talk) but even more happy that I got to attend so many great sessions.

The facility and food were great. The absolute worst complaint I heard over the conference was that breakfast on the second day was a big letdown. I agree. And yes - that's the worst thing I can say about cfObjective. In fact, I believe that's the only negative I heard the entire conference which just goes to show how well things went. I've said this before but I much prefer conferences where you can stay in the hotel. I'll take slightly more expensive, or slightly less fancy facilities, if I can get the convenience of being able to get to the sessions from my hotel room in a few minutes.

Content wise here's what I especially enjoyed:

  • Scott Stroz and Jeff Coughlin both did good sessions on Solr, with Scott's being an intro and Jeff's being a more advanced talk.
  • Marc Esher did a great session entitled "ORM Zen" - basically covering relationships in ORM and other issues that are - as we say - non-trivial. Anyone who has gone beyond "Hello World" in ORM knows that care is required when working with related entities.
  • Jeff Gladnick did a great session on OAUTH. It's a topic that always seemed a bit weird to me but Jeff did a great job of explaining it. He focused on Facebook and Twitter and showed some great live examples.
  • Dave Ferguson gave a great talk intrusion issues. Ie, not how to stop hacking, but how to detect when it has already happened. This isn't a topic I've seen covered before and I thought it was very interesting.
  • The conference ended for me with two great JavaScript sessions. First Ezra Parker talked about performance optimization in jQuery, and then Eliott Sprehn discussed AngularJS. AngularJS is very Spry-like, but more Spry-on-steroids. It's something I plan on looking at in a few weeks.

If you missed out on cfObjective this year, I strongly urge you to consider attending next year. For me, the last two years of cfObjective have been incredible. I've come back both exhausted and excited about new technologies and development in general.