cf.Objective() short review. Wow!

cf.Objective() ended yesterday and I have to say that it was an amazing experience. I have never been so overwhelmed by info and yet excited about it all at the same time. The sessions and the speakers were outstanding, the accommodations were good, and the camaraderie was the best around. I got to meet many of my favorite bloggers, meet some of the super-talented experts in the field, and make some new friends. I really had a great time and I can hardly wait until next year.

Sessions:
Most of the sessions I attended were fabulous. My favorites were:

• John Paul AshenFelter's Agile Boot Camp - I am pretty well sold on the idea of Agile Development and I am looking forward into implementing it. I'm pretty sure that when it comes to development, there is little he has not done. Great Presentation!
• Peter Farrell's ANT Presentation - Absolutely GREAT intro to ANT. I almost did not go because I have been experimenting with ANT for a couple of weeks and thought that it would be mostly an "Intro to ANT" review. But then I heard some highlights from the previous session and decided to go to the repeat. It was great. I learned a lot about best practices, third-party tools, and the existence of more advanced features. Definitely worth my time.
• Luis Majano's Advanced ColdBox Framework hands-on session - Wow! ColdBox is a powerful, full-featured framework with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, Luis was unable to make it through everything that he had planned due to a lack of time and his over-estimation of our abilities, but what he was able to show us really displayed some of the power of the framework. Specifically, he showed us the Layout Manager and how it can be use to create quick, customizable layouts that can be managed per view or per folder of views. Additionally, he showed us how we can create viewlets to be views within views.
• Mark Drew's Intro to ColdSpring - At first I was very disappointed to hear that there would not be an "Intro to ColdSpring" session at the conference. ColdSpring has always seemed like a complex topic to me. Well Mark Drew changed that! His intro to ColdSpring showed us that beginning to use ColdSpring did not require much more than having a clear picture of how your objects work together and then setting a config file to represent that picture. I am looking forward to getting started.
• Phill Nacelli's Leveraging Design Patterns in ColdFusion - This was probably my #1 session for the weekend. Phill was able to get across not only what design patterns are and what problems they solved but also how to use them in ColdFusion code. He was able to show us how we were using Design Patterns already and how to use them in the future. He said he was going to start a series based on the talk and cover some more patterns. I will definitely look forward to that.

Name Dropping:
Amazing conferences go hand-in-hand with amazing speakers and "celebrities". I got to meet and talk with several ColdFusion Celebrities over the weekend, and at the risk of sounding like a groupie, I was thrilled to meet a lot of people to whom I look up.

• Charlie Arehart
• Mark Drew
• Ben Nadel
• Matt Woodward
• Peter Farrell
• Kurt Wiersma
• Doug Hughes
• Judith and Michael Dinowitz - Fusion Authority
• Jeff Couglin
• And many more

What an amazing experience. Thanks to everyone on the cf.Objective() steering committee (I could not find a list of names) for putting on a great conference, and thanks to Jared for being the Chief Instigator that made this all possible.