Jeffry Houser's Blog - Writing and Presenting

Random Thoughts from the 360|Flex Experience

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:00:00 -0400

After every conference, I like to put down my thoughts about it and get a blog post out. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being a sponsor, presenter, and attendee at 360|Flex in Denver. The conference was great, as always, and I walked away with very positive vibes for the future of Flex. Although no one is too happy with Adobe, they are positive about Flex and the Apache foundation.

Being a Sponsor

Flextras was a sponsor of the conference this year, promoting our line of UI Components. The components are now free for production use. It is one step in our switch to advanced support. People seemed very positive about the move. We put together My speaker ratings were kind of middle of the road, but at least most people found the session informative. Ever since the rating app moved to mobile devices; the amount of comments available have gone down tremendously, which is a bit of a bummer. I'd love feedback if you happened to have seen my presentation. I'll be giving the same presentation at D2WC next week. The conference had a weird vibe during the Speaker Sponsor dinner. It felt a bit like a last hurrah. In some respects it was. Times are changing. Thanks to the advent of mobile devices the "it runs the same everywhere" stance is no longer guaranteed. I believe the use of Flash (or AIR) is going to be more focused; and discrete.

360|Flex MCP

For a while 360Conferences have added a "MVP" designation to certain people who have helped the conference in some manner. I got blessed this year to be one of those. John actually called me a "Business Mentor" up on stage when I was awarded my hoodie. I was amused by this, because I don't feel like a business success. I don't feel like a failure either, but I'm chugging along having fun. DotComIt hasn't grown to where I want it to be; but I haven't had to give it up either. John and I often bounce ideas off each other. I see it more of a peer relationship than a mentoring relationship. I don't have any magic secret business sauce. I also got to see a lot of other friends; and that is part of the reason I love 360|Flex. Tom Ortega, asked me what my plan was. He mentioned that I always have a plan. I have no idea when I learned to start thinking two steps ahead, but he's right. I do have a plan. :-)

Welcome to 360|Stack

360|Flex started as a "cool idea" to get a bunch of Flex Developers together and has blossomed into a conference company that extends beyond just Flex. They put on a Mac development conference and a iPhone developer conference. Some of the "beyond Flex" started to trickle into 360|Flex. There have been a bunch of non-Flex related sponsors and sessions this year such as Appcelerator and Sencha. As John said, the community around 360|Flex is about the work we're focused on doing; not a specific technology. As such the conference is being rebranded as 360|Stack. Next year will represent the full dev stack; whether that is HTML5 or Flex Development or something different. I can't wait to see how the next year unfolds.

CF101 Archive: October 2007 Every Beginner must Grow Up

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0400

CF101 Archive: September 2007 Object Oriented Pizza

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This is without a doubt the favorite article I've ever written. I wrote it afraid I was going to become the active target for every high level CF Developer. That didn't happen thankfully. I remember the response being relatively positive.

CF101 Archive: February 2007 Data Table Gateways

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This article follows the design pattern scheme of the previous one and focuses on Data Table Gateways. An interesting tibbit is that I would rip my articles out of the PDFs and write up these entries while watching the TV Show supernatural. I bet I got out of the habit when the season ended which is why these articles remained unposted for so long.

CF101 Archive: January 2007 Data Access Objects

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. In this article, I delved into some of the design patterns that a lot of ColdFusion developer's were starting to use, in this case data access objects. I don't have anything against design patterns but I often feel some of the proponents of design patterns pitch them as the answer to all your problems. In reality, they are just an approach to solve something and there is often a tradeoff for using one to solve a problem.

CF101 Archive: October 2006 Five Cool Things with ColdFusion

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This is one of my favorite articles; because I cover a lot of the cool things I had been doing in my own development, such as hooking CF up to a credit card scanner and a bar code scanner and generating bar codes. Around this time, CFDJ's publication schedule started to get more and more spotty. I didn't know for sure at the time, but it was probably starting to wind down. The publication world was starting to change, and magazines were not going to be the future.

CF101 Archive: September 2006 A first look at FusionDebug

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This article is a look at the third party ColdFusion command line debugger, FusionDebug. Debuggers like this are a fantastic tool for programmers. I loved it when working with technologies that pre-dated my work with CF and I loved it when working with Flex. For some reason, debuggers never took a final resting place in my CF Toolset.

CF101 Archive: July 2006 Creating an RSS Aggregator Part 2

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

CF101 Archive: Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This is the second half of my article on creating an RSS Aggregator project. Later versions of ColdFusion made this project much simpler, I think by adding a CFFEED tag or something similar.

CF101 Archive: June 2006 Getting Started with Flex 2

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This article probably represents my first foray into Flex development, something I've done a lot of over the years. It's amazing to see how far Flex has come since being introduced.

CF101 Archive: May 2006 Creating an RSS Aggregator

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This article was the first about building an RSS Aggregator, which I had coined MyFriends. As an open source project, it never took off. But, it was fun writing this article--and part 2 which came up 2 months later. The link to the aggregator software is still in the sidebar on my blog. I should probably remove that.

CF101 Archive: April 2006 Isn't it time to Dump CF5?

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

CF101 Archive: March 2006 Making the Switch to CFEclipse

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. Before CF Builder existed, a lot of CF Developers used CFEclipse. It was a free IDE and much more lightweight than Dreamweaver. This article focuses on my own experiences switching.

CF101 Archive: February 2006 AJAX

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

Disclaimer: In 2007, sys-con closed down the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, and I wanted to post all the articles I had written to this site. I started, but got distracted on other things. I'm performing a purge of my digital archives and found the articles. At this point they are posted here more for my own archival purposes than because anyone is longing to read them. This article is being reposted in accordance to my contract with sys-con. I had them change the default contract so that I could post articles on my personal site. This article talked about the theory behind how AJAX worked. At the time AJAX was a new thing. This got reposted by sys-con a year (and change) later, and I got ridiculed by a commenter because the article did not focus on his AJAX framework of choice. After 3-4 times back and forth with him; I gave up the discussion.

CF101 Archive: December 2005 Data Encryption in ColdFusion

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:00:00 -0400

CF101 Archive: November 2005 Making it as an independent Consultant

info@theflexshow.com (Jeffry Houser and John Wilker) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:50:00 -0400