Relief and Excitement

October is drawing to a close and I am left with 2 emotions, relief and excitement.  For those of you who have been following what has been going on in the life of Simon, via twitter or conversations with me, you will know that October has been an extremely busy month.  On top of the usual day job related work I also had a lot of work to do for the two conferences that occurred this month, CFinNC and bFusion/bFlex.  

Both conferences required a lot of preparation and being only 1 week apart mean that I needed to do everything at the same time.  Both conferences have gone off without a hitch and everything that I needed to prepare was completed successfully.  To all of you who attended some of my sessions, Thank You!  I hope you learnt as much from the sessions as I did while preparing them. 

As well as my regular sessions I also had the amazing opportunity to take part in the ColdFusion keynote during bFusion.  After my initial trepidation of being assigned the task of making “something cool” I really enjoyed making the whac-a-mole augmented reality application and the MAC Jr robot controller.  I learnt a lot of things while developing them and look forward to delving deeper into the technologies.

Now that these sessions are over I am filled with relief.  However much fun I had at the conferences and however much fun I had preparing my presentations, I am glad that I have a little bit of respite before the next conference.  I am also filled with excitement.  These two conferences have given me a lot of inspiration for future projects that I want to work on.  They have also given me a lot to think about in regards to how I currently code.  There are many best practices that I realize I have yet to adopt and I am excited to research them and implement them in my future projects.

I am also really excited to share everything I learnt while making my keynote applications.  There was a lot of interest after the keynote as to how the different applications functioned, especially with the augmented reality application, and I am looking forward to writing some blog posts about how I made the applications.

I hope that all of you who went to these conferences feel as inspired as I do and I hope that I will get to see a lot of cool applications that you are all now building.  For those of you who want to get some inspiration you should check out the next conference coming up, RIA Unleashed, in Boston on November 13th (yes, it is a Friday).  There are going to be many heavy hitters attending the conference and the line up looks like it will be exceptional.