CF Sunstroke

So our first ever cfdevcamp came and went this weekend. The day went very well and most of it is already a blur... We had a great turnout, including around 7 or 8 people who came in from outside Phoenix. 5 or 6 from Tucson, one from S California and I think even one person from Seattle!

I'm so proud of out team, everyone worked so hard to make this event happen and then spent an entire Saturday helping total strangers learn a little but more about ColdFusion. It was exciting to be part of something like that.

This post is mostly for myself and the other members of the cfdevcamp Phoenix team, after hosting a big event like that it's best to get down your immediate thoughts on what went well and what didn't can be crucial for planning your next big event.

• Showing everyone the really cool new features on CF / CFB and Apptacular
  • While having Terry there was awesome, and his presentation great, it really distracted people away from simple, core CF projects.
  • Everyone got VERY excited about CF Builder and ORM, but then spent most of the day trying to get it to work
• Beer: Beer was a fun idea and a good marketing gimmick, but really, hardly anyone drank it.
  • To be fair, the beer from San Tan Brewing was awesome (even if it comes in cans not bottles), Chip and Lisa were super nice and the food there after cfdevcamp was awesome
• Sodas an energy drinks were fairly popular, but not in the quantities I had expected.
  • The 12 pack of Bawls went quickly, but I think mostly out of curiosity and shock value, there were many jokes about "my bawls"
  • No one touched the red bull... However it wasn't in any of the coolers
  • Hardly any of the sodas were touched, but they were buried in the coolers and the cooler were not labeled.

• Dry Run 
  • At least 2 weeks in advance of the event. We need time to make sure things will work well and if hey don't time to find a way to make them...
• Central dedicated DB server
  • MS SQL and MySQL on it so no one needs to worry about standing up a DB server locally. It cause TOO many problems 
• Installation Walk through:
  • We spent FAR too much time helping people get setup, that nearly buried the day.
  • Next time, we need to a large group walk through on how to install each piece of software and configure it, including how to connect CF to the central shared DB server. This should allow 90% of the people to get up and running in the first hour and will let us focus on the 10% that are still having problems.
• Dedicated staff:
  • Don't mis-understand me, the volunteers we had were super dedicated to helping out, I mean we need to have certain people dedicated to certain tasks.
    • Someone who's in charge of registration, taking photos, helping with installations, tweeting etc...
• Pre-planned and tested demos. 
  • We need to come up with a few simple ideas that we can walk newbies through. Ideas we know we can build, that we've tested and we can take them through quickly.
• Group Photo
  • I really wish we had taken the time to do a few, both with the whole gang there and a few with just the staff..,
• Label the shirts with their sizes...
  • CafePress was awesome, but the only thing that had the sizes on the were the shirt tags, which were not always accessible... I had to open virtually every shirt to see what size it was.
• Get more info about the users during registration.
  • While we didn't run into any issues this year with users, we should try to ask people for a little info on things like, desired shirt size, any food needs or allergies...