Speaking at NCDevCon 2014, and Why NCDevCon Rocks
Posted 15 August 2014
I’m really honored to be speaking at this year’s NCDevCon. This will be my fourth year in a row as a speaker at the conference, and I’m excited to be returning to Raleigh for what I expect to be another great conference.
Why do I love NCDevCon?
- It’s cheap. For the quality, variety, and number of sessions, this conference is a steal. Equivalent conferences held elsewhere in the U.S. that don’t have quite the same regional flair usually run upwards of $800 for registration. NCDevCon has always been incredibly affordable.
- The speakers are great. The NCDevCon team puts a lot of effort into recruiting well-established speakers and finding new ones, especially new speakers from the Raleigh/North Carolina area. Fresh voices are always welcome, and they mix well with the established speakers who you see headlining conferences elsewhere.
- There’s a good mix of Web technologies covered. While NCDevCon used to be heavily focused on ColdFusion development — and there’s still a track dedicated to ColdFusion — the conference over the past few years has swayed towards the front-end and mobile. This has brought in new opportunities for learning, especially for ColdFusion developers who don’t see new versions of our main application server runtime for 12-18 months at a time.
- It’s small(ish). Given that there are 300 tickets for the conference, you can actually meet people, talk to speakers, and make new friends. You don’t feel like you’re lost in a sea of 2000 guys from Oracle and IBM (not that there’s anything wrong with working for Oracle or IBM).
- Raleigh (and the surrounding area) has great food. I’m a foodie. There’s lots of good stuff to be had in Raleigh, and in nearby Chapel Hill. I make an annual pilgrimage to Allen and Son BBQ outside Chapel Hill, but that’s because I’m a sucker for awesome Carolina BBQ.
So now that you know why I love NCDevCon, I figure I should talk about what I’m going to talk about!
“Start Using Amazon Web Services in Your ColdFusion Apps”
Amazon Web Services provide a wide array of highly scalable tools which solve common problems in modern Web application development. ColdFusion fits right into the AWS ecosystem, and this session will show you just how easy it is to start using AWS in your ColdFusion applications. We’ll look at:
- Cheap, fast, and easy content storage thanks to ColdFusion’s integration with AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Creating ColdFusion servers in AWS using the official Adobe ColdFusion Amazon Machine Image
- Plug-in points for other AWS services in your ColdFusion applications
- A reference architecture for running scalable ColdFusion applications in AWS
- Some hard-earned lessons about running Web apps in AWS
AWS is a huge topic (Amazon has their own 5-day conference with over 150 sessions dedicated solely to AWS), so this is a lot to cover. I’ll be employing my usual, “firehose” presentation style, but if you want to get up to speed quickly with what AWS can offer your ColdFusion application (or, honestly, web application development in general), you should get a lot out of this session.
I hope to see you there!