In a previous blog post, we mentioned the Zero to Hero workshop. As some of you may have deduced given the title, this is a continuation of said workshop. This two-day advanced Hero to Superhero workshop will feature CEO of Ortus Solutions, Luis Majano. In this API edition, you will be creating an API from scratch, then you’ll secure it, you’ll leverage it, and then build a little object model.
Our Into the Box workshops are carefully selected so that you can the make the most out of your time and investment in the conference. It might be redundant to highlight the importance of this workshop since troubleshooting is a problem everyone goes through.
Next up in our podcast series we have Brad Wood, who’ll lead the Intro to BDD Workshop. To begin with, let’s start by defining a few terms. BDD stands for Behavior Driven Development, which builds on top of TDD. In Brad’s words, “BDD is kind of a natural evolution of coming up with your user stories first, your business scenarios first, and then out of those, inherently grow your unit testing suite or your integration testing suite. So, reorganizing your development shop to first appreciate the value in the utility of testing and the actual cost savings that you get in the long run and implement, meaning that is often times the first step for people.”
The aim of this workshop, with the above as evidence, is to highlight the importance of creating tests, and how they’re essential for the eventual success of your coding. While it may seem as a hassle to some, said tests will eventually save you lots of valuable time. As such, the one-day workshop will give you an understanding of how TestBox works and how to write effective tests.
If this is of interest to you, make sure to check out the full interview on your podcast provider, our website, or our Youtube channel.
Into the Box has become a community of developers and interested individuals that share the same passion: excellency in what they do. As such, we are excited to announce our upcoming partnership for Into the Box 2020. This time around, we have CMD, a web-consultancy company which excels in helping clients develop amazing apps.
The Conference-Edition podcast aims to provide a one-of-a-kind insight on Into the Box 2020. This episode was no exception as our host, Gavin Pickin, talked more about the famous Zero to Hero workshop.
For the first time in Into the Box history, we will have a workshop dedicated to Quick ORM. In this Conference Edition episode, we talk with Eric Peterson, Software Consultant for Ortus Solutions and creator of Quick.
Before continuing, we need to define a few terms. ORM is a pattern and stands for object relational mapper. It maps ColdFusion components, in this case, to the database. Before Quick, most people using an ORM with CFML dealt with a built-in solution based on Hibernate. Quick is not based on Hibernate or any built-in solution, but it is built completely in CFML. (It's actually built on top of some other libraries like qb, a query builder library that some people might be familiar with.)
In this workshop, Eric will teach attendees how to get started with Quick. They will learn how to integrate Quick in both in new projects and existing projects. They’re going to learn what a Quick entity is, how to define them, how to define relationships between entities, and how to grab that data from the database. They're going to talk about how to eliminate duplicate query logic, some common performance pitfalls with any database-driven application, and how Quick helps you solve them.
If you’re interested in this one day workshop, head onto intothebox.org and buy your ticket now. For the full interview, visit our YouTube page, our website, or your favorite podcast provider.
This year, we are fortunate enough to have Adobe by our side again as our partner at Into the Box 2020. With the support of Adobe, we have been able to work and expand within the ColdFusion community, not only in the United States, but also with our initiatives in Latin America. Their help has been invaluable in ensuring that our conferences are a huge success.
As the undisputed trailblazer in the business, Adobe has been the frontrunner in innovation with their wide range of products and services. By providing a complete digital experience, Adobe offers thousands of business solutions to their clients. It comes as no surprise that Adobe has become a household name.
As such, we are honored to have them sponsoring Into the Box 2020 again, where developers and individuals come together in search for the latest in ColdFusion and Web Development, its engaging workshops, and full-days of non-stop conferences. Make sure then to stop by their booth, so you can get the latest on Adobe products and news.
Tell us about...
Tell us something funny about yourself?
When I was little my mother led me to believe that I was funny. My wife has not forgiven her for this.
Why should companies or developers modernize?
Nothing in the world stays still. In fact, there is a certain level of entropy that enters our lives every day unless we actively push back against it. Call it the "cost of being alive" if it helps. To stop creating or to stop making our products and craftsmanship better is either giving over to that entropy or falsely assuming
we have reached the pinnacle of existence, which probably isn't true. Not moving forward carries with it the built in decision to make yourself irrelevant and hoping that no one will notice. Not to act like a spoiler but chances are the audience you're trying to deceive will notice well before you want them to.
Why is ColdFusion (CFML) still relevant?
This question always reminds me of a story about a man wandering the world looking for wisdom. In his wanderings he finds a teacher and asks, "Sir, do I really exist?". The teacher looks at him and says, "Whom shall I say is asking?". CF is relevant because we have a community of people, products, tools, companies, blogs, podcasts, conferences and careers that are active, presumably making a living and solving problems well enough that we can exist to ask the question. J.J. Allaire created CFML in 1995 so it's only 6 years younger than the World Wide Web itself. How many other languages, communities and technofads have arisen and flamed out in that time? CF isn't the answer for all things but it's a fantastic answer for many things. Maybe it's naive but I think it will only stop being relevant when that community doesn't exist anymore to ask the question.
What would you like to experience during the conference?
I have a very active two year old at home. If I could experience a nap I'd consider it a win. I'm excited that a "siesta" is built into the schedule. One thing I love about going to conferences is just being around so many people who are actively working on getting better at what they do. Frequently they are approaching problems in ways I haven't considered and know about things of which I've never encountered. There's also something affirming when you realize that the reason that you have a roadblock isn't (necessarily) because you're an idiot but because you're also moving forward and you're starting to really understand the complexities that you're facing. Sometimes, seeing how someone farther down the development trail solved the problem usually helps bring your own situation into more clarity. Ideally, on a good day, you might be able to reciprocate.
Which speaker at ITB do you want to sit down and ask a few questions?
Looking at the speaker list, I have a slight apprehension that I'm going to be like Wayne and Garth backstage at Alice Cooper in Wayne's World. If I get through the week without shouting "I'm not worthy" to a few people, I'll consider it a major feat. I'm looking forward to Pete Freitag's Security workshop. Jeffrey Kunkel's session looks like a good reminder that we're human beings behind the keyboard, not an extension of the CPU. Ideally, it would be great to find a way to wire up Luis' and Brad's brains and just "push play" then sit back and start taking notes. That being said, there are very few people in the world that you can't learn something from and the CF community tends to attract some great people.
Why should attendees go to your session?
I'd like to think that my session is little bridge between some of the large lofty ideals of DevOps, Automated Testing and customizing workflow and the feeling of "Crap, I'm back from the conference, I'm in front of my keyboard and I'm supposed to be typing something". CommandBox is such a powerful tool and does so much that it's easy not to know where to start. What the session does is lay out some common real world scenarios and the challenges that you'll need to fix in order to navigate them. Then we go through how you can use some of the features of CommandBox to either minimize, automate or even sidestep those challenges all together. The session is based on many of the processes we are implementing at Springboard as our developer team grows and our platform becomes more sophisticated. So, I guess the answer is 1) Immediate relevance, 2) widespread applicability and 3) my wife has made me promise not to try and be funny.
What is your favorite *Box Product and why?
CommandBox followed by TestBox. As "fanboy" as this probably sounds, CB was the solution to so many roadblocks in my development process that I wasn't even aware that I had. If I'm at my computer, chances are that it's open. I've started using it with my college students and have based most of the developer workflow at Springboard around what it can do.
Meet our speaker
Dan
Card
Dan Card is the CTO of getSpringboard.com and has been using CFML for 15+ years in a variety of settings including in the education, non-profit and for-profit sectors. He is the coordinator for the Boston ColdFusion Users Group and is an educator at the Univ. Of Mass. Lowell in the Division of Online and Continuing Education.
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Meet our speaker
Gavin
Pickin
Gavin started using ColdFusion in 1999 when working for the university of Auckland in New Zealand before moving to California. He has lead teams, trained new developers and worked the full stack from graphic design, HTML CSS JavaScript through to ColdFusion MySQL and server administration.
Gavin has a passion for learning and cannot understand why the 9-5ers aren't listening to podcasts while changing diapers, watching video tutorials while cleaning baby bottles and folding clothes, or putting the kids to sleep with soothing phone gap mobile application cookbook recipes.
You will find him blogging at gpickin.com and on twitter @gpickin and occasionally being mocked on cfhour's podcast.
Tell us about...
Tell us something funny about yourself?
A lot of people like my New Zealand accent, but my wife says, "yeah, its great, until you realize you have no idea what he's saying".
Why should companies or developers modernize?
It's in our best interest to make the most of the latest and greatest tools available to help us do our jobs. If you can be faster, more efficient, more effective, more reliable, we should take that advantage.
Why is ColdFusion (CFML) still relevant?
ColdFusion is a mature and powerful language, built on top of the JVM, giving us the full power of Java at our fingertips. With modern tools like Package Management and Containerization, CFML gets the job done.
What would you like to experience during the conference?
I want to catch up with friends, new and old alike. I always leave Into the Box inspired to do bigger better things, and put into action all the amazing new things I have learned.
Which speaker at ITB do you want to sit down and ask a few questions?
Brian Klaas always has great AWS presentations, and there is always more to learn with AWS.
Why should attendees go to your session?
If you are looking for a Content Management System, I'll show you not only how to get up and running with ContentBox, but how to deploy it to a cloud provider using Docker.
What is your favorite *Box Product and why?
CommandBox, because without it, we'd still be in the stone ages.
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Tell us about...
Why should companies or developers modernize?
No one likes maintaining legacy code. Yet we all have legacy code. Modernizing is the way out. It allows us to convert legacy code in to code that we enjoy working with without rewriting from scratch.
Why is ColdFusion (CFML) still relevant?
CFML is still relevant because CFML is still evolving. Open source engines like Lucee and companies like Ortus are pushing what we can accomplish — creating powerful abstractions, frameworks, and tools to match the developer experience in other languages.
What would you like to experience during the conference?
I love the collective brain trust that gathers for ITB. There are so many great ideas thrown around. I hope to have time to sit down, hopefully with some of the attendees, and add some great features and fixes to our open source arsenal.
Which speaker at ITB do you want to sit down and ask a few questions?
I really am looking forward to chatting with Wil. He's been at the front of Quick and qb and I look forward to hearing his experiences. Matthew Clemente always has great insights to making our Ortus products more accessible to the wider CFML community and I enjoy hearing his ideas as well.
Why should attendees go to your session?
If you want more portable, version-controlled development environments, come learn about cfmigrations and commandbox-migrations.
If you have used CFORM in the past or have no idea what an ORM is, come see how it helps you interact with your database with Quick.
What is your favorite *Box Product and why?
It would have to be ColdBox. Modules and ForgeBox changed the game for CFML and have enabled many more shared libraries and frameworks to emerge.
Meet our speaker
Eric
Peterson
Eric Peterson (@_elpete) is a cfml and javascript developer at O.C. Tanner in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended the University of Utah and received a degree in Information Systems thinking he would hate programming as a career. He started programming in cfml (and in general) in 2012 and has never been more happy to be proved wrong. What he lacks in experience, he makes up for by demos and blogging. A beginner himself, he blogs about many beginner topics at http://dev.elpete.com.
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Into the Box 2020 Podcast Series: Hero to Superhero with Luis Majano
