cf.Objective 2008 - Postscript
It's over and few things need stating:
- cf.Objective repeated its performance as the awesomest conference ever
- The entire steering committee out did themselves in terms of content and speakers.
- Once again, the cf.Objective not only delivers great lectures from the experts, but the ability to actually interact with them.
Almost everything this year was better:
- Room scheduling - I saw no ad hoc room changes due to audience size.
- Power distribution - there were many outlets available in every room
- Venue - I thought the rooms and facilities were just as good as last year, but the staff was much more helpful.
On the con side:
- Wireless was terrible.
- The food was hit or miss.
Neither of those two facts was, in any way, a real problem for me. Put another way, if I traveled back in time to tell me that the wireless services and food would suck at cf.Objective 2009, I would still go. Then I would be very mad that I wasted time travel on that.
As with last year, I find myself building a list of things that I will challenge myself to adopt over the next year, after absorbing all of the geek radiation at cf.O. Last year's list was about starting things: starting local development; starting to use ColdSpring. I think this is more about refining things I have used before, and getting the most out of them.
My cf.Objective 2009 ToDo list:
- Perfect my build process
- Move all of my projects over to "perfect one step builds"
- Utilize Subversion correctly with tags and branches
- Adopt an MVC framework
- I'm leaning towards Model-Glue 3
- Start using AOP in ColdSpring
- Come up with a topic to speak again
- I like talking about soft skills within technical areas, to that end I have a few ideas
- Formal Code Reviews
- Influence Techniques for Geeks
- Hiring Effective Developers
- Selling Professional Development to the Resistant Shop 2: Rise of the Uniformed
- I might need to come up with some technical presentations,
- Writing Boilerplate Code
- Writing Code for Team Reuse
- Gain traction on the rumor that Mark Mandel has a marsupial pouch
- Collaborate more with people in the community
- Contribute to someone else's open source project
- Work with someone just for fun
- Team up with somebody for a side project
So that's my list. I challenge everyone to coming up with their own, and posting it on their respective blogs.
Comments
I think any of your "soft skills" ideas would be interesting. BTW, how does one become a presenter at conferences? Is it by invitation, or do you submit an idea to the organizers, etc?




Posted by: Steve Bryant at May 6, 2008 9:47 AM