At Into the Box, we consider ourselves modernizers and innovators. As such, we choose speakers and sessions that will benefit and teach attendees about the ever-changing technology. Today we’ll highlight Michael Born. Michael is an Ortus senior developer, and will lead the “Power Up Your Search with cbElasticSearch” session on May 7th from 2:00 PM until 2:50 PM. He’s the one with different colored eyebrows and eyelashes - one blond, one dark brown. All this makes him suspect he’s his own twin…
Debating whether to attend? According to Michael, “if your web app needs search capabilities, you almost certainly need Elasticsearch. If you need Elasticsearch, you need CBElasticsearch. And if you need CBElasticsearch, you need my talk to teach you how to use CBElasticSearch. I cover using Elasticsearch in CFML from basic concepts all the way to integrating search into your API handlers.”
Still hesitant? Follow Michael’s advice: “You know, they tell us in school "don't choose a course, choose a professor". That's no different for ITB. I learned a lot from Brad's talk last year and I'm really looking forward to his "Migrating The Legacy Out of your Applications!" for this year.”
As to his favorite Box product, he states “definitely have to go with ColdBox. Everything else is just a supportive role - we can't have "nice things" without ColdBox. I wrote APIs using vanilla CFML for years before I ever started using ColdBox, and I would never go back. Basically, ColdBox makes CFML modern and powerful.”
Our Speaker Blog Post Series wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t include our Keynote speakers. Meet Jorge Reyes, Ortus’ Business Manager. When asked to share an anecdote or something funny so attendees could get a sense of who he was, his exact words were : “I live in Switzerland but work under US Eastern Time :D ja ja ja? It's funny to me.”
At Into the Box, our aim is to provide engaging sessions and insights about ever-changing technologies. In our Speaker Blog Post Series, our aim is to provide attendees with more information regarding our team of prepared speakers. As such, we’d like to introduce you to Samuel Knowlton.
Samuel was once pulled over for speeding while wearing a kilt in a red Jeep Wrangler in Delaware! With that anecdote, we feel like we already know him better! He is also the founder and managing director of inLeague, a boutique web application firm specializing in the management and operations of youth sports leagues and charter school admissions and lotteries.
At the conference, he will be leading the “QB For the Rest Of Us: 1.21 Gigawatts of Fluent and Functional” session on May 7th from 1:00 PM until 1:50 PM. Why should you attend, you may ask? Well, in his words, “ QB is the cornerstone not just of modern & functional query syntax, but also of cfmigrations, Quick, and never writing "sql &= sql & ' SOME MORE SQL' again!” In regards to his favorite Box product, for him it’s “a toss-up between Coldbox, which broke us of many bad habits, and Quick, which made us love ORM again!”
In an effort to have attendees “meet” our speakers, we have started our Speaker Blog Post Series. Next up, we have Brian Klaas. Brian is the Senior Technology Officer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Teaching and Learning but he has also been voted The Meanest Dad in the World ™ four years running by the voting academy of his children.
He will be leading the “I Didn’t Know S3 Could Do That” session on May 7th from 5:10 PM to 6:00 PM. According to Brian, “there is so much more to S3 than just storing files. Really. There's a huge amount of functionality — and cost savings! — if you step beyond the basics of what our CFML runtimes provide us with S3 integration. It's not terribly hard to achieve, and I'm happy to share with everyone just how easy it is to make that happen. Improved security, significant cost savings, and powerful functionality — all in a couple of lines of code. Sounds like a bad marketing ploy but it's shockingly true!”
When it comes to his favorite Box product, he states: “there are many good choices, but today it's ColdBox. Any programming language doesn't go very far these days without a great, de facto framework. ColdBox is and has evolved from a simple MVC framework to one that agilely handles a variety of web application tasks. And all the good ColdBox packages via ForgeBox? Damn.” Make sure to tune in to his talk and after that, stay for a little mingling! He’s looking forward to connecting with “people much, much smarter than me showing me better ways of working. And, always, the Happy Hour, to which I will gladly bring my awesome bourbon punch this year.”
Into the Box 2020 can’t come soon enough! To prepare, we asked our speakers to share a little bit more about their lives and experiences so that we can get to know them better…
Meet Colombian Javier Quintero. When he was a child, he waited in line for almost two hours to get into a roller coaster and when it was his turn, he got scared and left! The Ortus developer is a fan of all things Box, but his favorite without a doubt, is ColdBox. When asked why he responded: “It has everything we need to develop any type of app. Everything is inbuilt and it has great performance. So easy to learn, very flexible and adaptable to meet our needs.”
Javier will be leading the “Just Do It! ColdBox Integration Testing” session on May 7th from 3:10 PM until 4:00 PM and the “cbSecurity - Secure All Things Box!” session on May 8th from 3:10 PM until 4:00 PM. Make sure you don’t miss his sessions as they are not only relevant, but also key for any developer. As to why, he said: “believe it or not, more than 50% of developers don't write tests because they think they are complex and will take forever to implement. I will show how to easily create unit and integration tests using TestBox.”
Into the Box will give attendees the opportunity to chat with speakers one-on-one. Javier is looking forward “to learning new stuff and have nice conversations about CFML and web development in general with the attendees that always have something of value to share.”
We are less than a month away from our much-anticipated Into the Box 2020 - A Virtual Experience . To say we are excited is an understatement, and to add to that excitement, we are proud to announce that Foundeo will be joining us as a Silver Sponsor!
Foundeo, Inc is a company based in Upstate New York that builds products for CFML and ColdFusion developers. They also provide expert CFML and ColdFusion consulting services. Foundeo’s products and services range from Fixinator to HackMyCF and FuseGuard. Fixinator scans your CFML source code for security vulnerabilities, and it can even fix some of them for you automatically. HackMyCF on the other hand, sends you an automated email report with loads of information designed to help you improve the security of your ColdFusion or Lucee Server, while FuseGuard is a high performance web application firewall that protects your ColdFusion & CFML applications from malicious requests. They also provide expert consulting services which could include code security reviews, server reviews, custom development and much more.
If you want to learn more about Foundeo, make sure to follow their Twitter account or check out their website!
Ortus Solutions has been constantly monitoring the developments of COVID-19. Given health officials’ recommendations, we are taking the necessary measures to ensure the safety and wellbeing of partners, attendees, speakers and staff. As such, we have decided to move our conference online.
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.
ITB Blog Post Series - Meet Michael Born
We are less than a month away from our much-anticipated Into the Box 2020 - A Virtual Experience . To say we are excited is an understatement, and to add to that excitement, we are proud to announce that