NSW ColdFusion User Group

Adobe Platform User Group, Sydney

nswcfug — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:16:22 +0000

If you want to meet CFers in Sydney come along to APUGS, which hosts regular monthly meetings at the RocketBoots office. The NSW CFUG has merged with the Flash group to become a super group, covering ColdFusion, Flex, Flash, Media Server, Data Services and other emerging Adobe technologies.

http://www.apugs.org.au/

Cheers,

Robin

CFCamping

nswcfug — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:17:37 +0000

Just a note to say I’m unable to host the CFUG this month, because I will be too busy presenting at all the CFCamps around Australia. The Sydney CFCamp details are here – don’t miss it, the headline act is the one and only Ben Forta on one of his rare sojurns to the Southern Hemisphere.

Charlie Arehart and Steve Bryant Live

nswcfug — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:16:12 +0000

Join us at 6:30pm this Wednesday September 12th at the RocketBoots offices for beer, pizza and two live guests from the U.S of A…

This month we have some “Fusioneers Handy Tools – keep your coding on
track and projects steaming along”

First up we have Charlie Arehart who shows how all ColdFusion
developers now have tools to step through their code interactively,
whether running on CF 6, 7, or 8. For those moving to CF8, there is
now a debugger built into CF, but it works only with CF8. For those on
CF 6, 7, or 8, they can use the commercial FusionDebug tool
(www.fusiondebug.com) . Both are plug-ins for Eclipse which enable
step debugging, with similarities and differences that Charlie will
cover.

Then Steve Bryant with then show us CodeCop which is a ColdFusion code
checker. It will selectively read code on the local system and report
back possible issues. It is fully configurable and you can choose
which rules it will use to determine possible issues or even make your
own rules (or import rules packages that others have created).

About our presenters for this meeting:

About Charlie Arehart
A veteran ColdFusion developer since 1997, Charlie Arehart is a
longtime contributor to the ColdFusion community. A certified Advanced
CF Developer and Instructor for CF 4-7 & member of the Adobe Community
Experts program, he is now an independent contractor providing
high-level troubleshooting and tuning assistance as well as training
and mentoring for CF teams. He also now runs the Online ColdFusion
Meetup with Ray Camden, is a frequent presenter at conferences/user
groups worldwide, and lives and works in Apharetta, GA (outside
Atlanta).
About Steve Bryant
Steve Bryant is the founder and CEO of Bryant Web Consulting LLC
(www.bryantwebconsulting.com) and teaches ColdFusion at Breakaway
Interactive (www.breakawayinteractive.com). He got his BA in
philosophy at Oklahoma State University. Steve, one of the top
ColdFusion developers in the country, still has no idea how that led
to a career in Web development. Steve blogs at
steve.coldfusionjournal.com as one of CFDJ’s published bloggers.

RSVP here.

Special Scorpio Meeting

nswcfug — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:40:24 +0000

Mark this date: There will be a special joint meeting of the NSW CFUG and Sydney Flash Platform Developers Group on Wednesday August 8 at our new venue. Wine, Beer, Pizza and sparkling city lights can be yours – or why not share it with that special someone in your life who uses ColdFusion but has never experienced the magic and joy of a user group meeting. Space is strictly limited, so make sure you…

Pinging the NSW ColdFusion Community

nswcfug — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:41:52 +0000

Ok, so perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to relaunch the usergroup during the summer silly season. We had a rather small meeting in December (Andrew Muller and Chris Velevitch shared the potato wedges with me) and the January meeting date has passed in a moment of holiday disorganisation. This leaves Feburary to catch up before Webdu descends upon us. Again, if anyone has any feedback about what format you’d like meetings to take or subjects we can cover, please comment on the previous post.

Regards,

Robin

Suggested topics and directions for next year

nswcfug — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:38:41 +0000

A lot of user group managers have said to me in the past that setting an agenda early is a key to making user groups more useful to their members. With this in mind I’d like to start a discussion regarding the topics/formats for next year.

One thing that will need to change is the mix of presenters. In the past it has been almost entirely up to regulars like Geoff, Andrew and me to prepare a long, hopefully interesting presentation for the group. In my own case this was easier when I was working for Macromedia, but after I started RocketBoots I found that I just didn’t have the time to spend 1-2 days a month preparing a presentation. This, combined with the uncertainty over the venue, has been a contributing factor to the lack of meetings this year. We really need more presenters, or to change the format to make it a less onerous task to prepare for a meeting.

Some ideas for different formats:

Study groups, e.g. tonight is “lets all install Reactor and try it out” night. Chris Velevitch has been trying this with the Flash group.
Code reviews: A panel discusses a real application with the developer and offers free advice.
Mixing canned presentations in with the live ones. Darren Tracy does this a lot at Queensland CFUG.
Plain social gatherings – a lot of people say that the networking aspect of the group is important.
Paid presenters – spending time preparing for a complex training style presentation etc is perfectly viable if presenters or trainers can be compensated for their preparation time.
Paintball, go-carts or other weekend, paid for activities. Should we have some activities that partners or family could attend (that’s the 30something coming out in me)?
Meetings targeted at non-CF developers to evangelise the product and get/train more developers (there is a complete shortage of CF skills in Sydney and elsewhere at present).
Trade/carreer shows, attending other conferences or user groups?
Tours, e.g. RocketBoots attempted MAX tour this year?
Working on projects together for charity on an ongoing basis.
What other ways could we use this site? We can have up to 35 logins without paying extra, so what wiki-like possibilities are there? Putting up files and slides from recent meetings is just the start.

Further to the actual format are the topics people would like to cover. Here are more suggestions:

New releases of ColdFusion
Framework/tool reviews: ColdSpring, Reactor, Rails, MG Unity
Recruitment, training developers
Show and tell (I don’t know what it will take to get some other people to show off their projects)

Then there is the venue question. Christmas drinks are sorted, I was wondering though how people would find meeting in Chatswood (the Adobe office) or if that is just too far (and before we get too many disgruntled “you’re kidding”s from the West, can I point out that in 2005 we went to a fair amount of trouble to arrange a westerly venue and the response wasn’t so good).

Lastly a little pep talk. It’s in all our interests to have an active ColdFusion user group in Sydney, particularly if we care going to find more ColdFusion developers. There is a real shortage of all developers – I heard last month that the intake for Sydney University IT is now the lowest it has been since the 1970s. If we want more developers we need a positive, supportive community to attract and keep people involved with the ColdFusion platform. If we aren’t proactive in this, eventually our business and our job security will suffer, and even worse there will be developers out there who haven’t had the joy of working with a great, RAD scripting language.

We need your help. It’s not up to Adobe and a few of us to make all this happen – we all have to get CF civic-minded, chip in and help. Even a few hours a year from each of us, or just making more of an effort to attend meetings and welcome new members, is a big help. Your first task as a community memeber is to have a think about this post and give us some feedback about what you want to see this year.

Thanks,

Robin

What do you mean, it’s December already? Christmas Drinks

nswcfug — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:39:54 +0000

Ok, so NSW CFUG has been a little slow off the mark this year – what do you say? Ah, yes, well this is a family blog and we can’t use those sorts of words in posts written before 9pm.

Since you’ve obviously missed us so much, it is probably time to catch up for Christmas drinks. Let’s say Monday the 11th of December, 6pm at the Lord Nelson pub. Please RSVP in the comments of this post. No presentations, just a general catchup to find out what everyone has been up to since WebDU (busy, isn’t it?) and perhaps discuss what sort of format people would be interested in for next year.

Cheers,

Robin