dev.objective 2015

It’s been just over a month since myself and Simon Hooker, Head of Product Development, returned from the dev.objective 2015 conference held at the Radisson Blu Mall of America between May 12th and 15th and I thought this was a good time to reflect on the conference and our experiences whilst there.

The dev.Objective() conference is a web developer conference that in previous years was called cf.Objective() and was specifically focused on ColdFusion and its community. This year’s change of focus to a general web developer conference was to try and broaden the scope of the conference to a wider audience and bring other technologies to the attention of the conference’s traditional audience. Having attended previously in 2014 I thought this was good to see as it not only gives the CFML developers in attendance a wider exposure to other web technologies, but the wider community exposure to CFML.

For myself this year’s conference was slightly different as mso were part of the platinum sponsorship of the conference along with the other members of the Lucee Association Switzerland. This meant that not only were myself and Simon there to learn from the broad array of talks taking place, but also to promote both mso and the Lucee platform to the other attendees at the conference. This proved to be an interesting experience and certainly allowed me to speak to a wider range of people than I had when I attended the conference for the first time in 2014.

Whilst I have a ton of notes from all the talks I attended and I’ve looked at some great things since returning, the conference was far more about the people than it was about the talks and the technical learnings that will help us stay ahead of the curve in the coming year.

The venue for the conference, the Radisson Blu Mall of America is a superb choice by the conference organisers. Its conference centre is extremely spacious and has a good vibe about it and along with the hotel’s bar and restaurant (as well as everything the Mall of America has to offer) makes a perfect environment for networking. For me, the networking really was the best part of the conference, meeting and talking with fellow digital agency workers, US government employees, guys and girls from start-ups, the usual suspects from the CFML community, as well as developer advocate from Mozilla, Dan Callahan and Alaska Airlines pilot Kris Korsmo.

Dan was kind enough to spend some time with us to give the Lucee community his thoughts on the Lucee project, giving us some invaluable tips on running an open source project. He also gave a few of us a hands-on go with some mobile devices running the Firefox OS during one of the many sessions in the bar one evening and I must say it looks very impressive considering the whole UI is based on web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. For entry level smartphones, smart TVs and the like, I think they are on to a winner.

Looking back a month on, I still find it hard to believe how much we managed to squeeze into the three and a bit days of the conference; the number of different people I met and spoke to and good times that were had by all. A big thanks to the conference organisers and I look forward to hopefully attending again in 2016.

If you are looking for a web development conference to attend in 2016, you couldn’t go far wrong with attending dev.Objective, perhaps I’ll see you there!!!