I've been really busy with work... but I'm still alive... and I have a few thoughts that I've jotted down with a note to blog about them, so I'll be blogging more in the very near future.
My wife's expecting our second son any time now... so I'll try and get some posts up before I become completely busy with bottles and diapers (again).

If you're a Flex developer in New York and don't know about it yet, there's a 2 day Flex Conference called 'Flex Camp Wall Street' (http://flexcampwallstreet.com/) on November 16 and 17 that at $49 to attend, looks like a great deal for attendees (what else can you do in New York for less than $50??)

I'll be presenting on ColdFusion/Flex integration at the conference on Monday.

For the benefit of anyone in NY who hasn't seen the email blasts, the NY Flex User Group and the NY ColdFusion User Group are holding a joint meeting tomorrow night (Wed. Jun 10th, 2009 at 6:30) for the Adobe User Group Tour. Ben Forta will be present for half the night on Centaur (ColdFusion 9) and Bolt (the new CF IDE) and for half the night on Flash Builder 4 (Flex 4). Should be a great evening.

The meeting is at:
New York Medical Center
550 1st Ave., Corner of E. 31st Street.
in the Smilow Seminar Room

Hope to see many of you there!

FigLeaf has cancelled their scheduled top gun conference (http://training.figleaf.com/topgun/). From the conference homepage:
"Unfortunately we were not able to meet our attendance quota.
We'll be announcing other exciting training events, however, in July 2009."

Once upon a time, the very talented folks at FigLeaf Software offered 'Top Gun' Training. In recent history, they began an annual 'Flex Maniacs' conference which became the 'Web Maniacs' conference. This year they've resurrected the 'Top Gun' naming and re-branded the conference as the 'CF & Flex Top Gun Conference', which is actually 3 one day conferences back to back. Day 1 is CF and AIR, day 2 is CF and Flex for Newbies, and day 3 is Flex and AIR.

Registration is now open - you can get one day passes for $199 or a 3 day pass for $499. Registration is online at https://training.figleaf.com/topgun/registration/index.cfm.

These days I'm very selective about what conferences I endorse and even more selective about which conferences I'll attend. I'm happy to say that I will be attending and speaking at the top gun conference, as I feel that of all the conferences this year, it's the best deal out there for the developers.

OK, I am now officially in love with Bill Gates. Well, "in love" is a bit strong, but when I read about him releasing a jar full of mosquitoes on a crowd of IT big shots and saying that "malaria is spread by mosquitoes...there is no reason only poor people should be infected", I was speechless. Not only is that the most creative thing I've EVER heard of a speaker doing before their audience to make a point, but it takes balls. Big ones. Good for you, Bill.

The Fox News Article about the incident is online at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,488348,00.html

There are two upcoming events that are both a great deal for anyone who wants to learn Flex on a budget. The first is bFlex (http://bflex.info/) - a free hands-on training event in Bloomington, Indiana on Sept. 7th (preceded on the 6th by bFusion, a free day of ColdFusion training). The second event is 360 Flex NJ (http://www.njflex.com/) - a 2 day Flex event being held on Sept. 26 and 27 just outside NYC in Montclair, NJ and offered at just $75 a day (day one is a single all-day training session and day two is composed of several sessions from well known speakers in the area).

This past week at the New York Flex User Group, Yakov Fain compared and contrasted 3 Flex frameworks (Cairngorm, PureMVC, and Mate). Yakov also showed an application his company is planning to release that is a code generator - creating both server and client side code (very similar to the Flex Builder CF wizard for building an LCDS app, only a bit more robust in the amount of code it generates and the options for server side technologies). The evening began with a quick examination/explanation of Flex itself, as a framework.

Attendance was great (60 people) and audience interest and participation was extraordinary. When the end of the presentation turned to an open discussion, it took very little time for the age old frameworks debate to ensue. Those of you who know my love for stirring the pot when it comes to topics like this may be surprised to know that I didn't get too involved in the actual framework "yes-no" side of the discussion. Even so, it felt funny being outside the CF world and getting stuck in the middle of the same religious debate that we CF developers are all too used to.

Actionscript is a language that I feel frameworks can bring a lot to when architected well... but I also feel that the Flex Framework alone is sufficient for most projects - especially given the size of the average Flex app. That said, I had never seen Mate before and after seeing Yakov's preso. thought that it looked pretty slick - I definitely plan to take a closer look at it sometime soon.

Getting back to the meeting itself, conversations lasted well over an hour after the meeting had ended. Though I don't want to fuel any fires, it's hard to ignore the enthusiasm and attendance witnessed at the meeting. So, I'm planning to hold a debate on Frameworks in Flex at an upcoming meeting. It will be a properly run debate with tables, time limits, and moderation. If anyone who reads this feels strongly about the topic of Flex frameworks (on either side of the argument), and thinks they'd make a good member of the debate at the table, please let me know (simon at horwith dot com). As soon as I've got a good team for both sides of the debate, I'll schedule it for an upcoming meeting.

Just a quick note - I noticed something really wrong in how my mail server was configured (one of my security settings was reset when I upgraded the mail software about 7 months ago) so I had about 7 months worth of undelivered mail in my CF Server undeliverable folder. Rath than killing it, I decided to push it out... better late than never, I suppose. I apologize to anyone who's inbox was attacked ;)

So, a lot of people have noticed and commented to me about dropping off the face of the world (from a CF Community point of view), so I thought I'd explain what I've been up to. As I've mentioned a few times in posts recently, my priorities in life definitely have changed since my son was born. He's put what's really important in life into perspective for me, which has definitely had a lot to do with how quiet I've been for a while.

I should begin by mentioning that I haven't at all stopped supporting the community, I've just been doing it more at user groups, classrooms, and client sites than anywhere else. I find that in these outlets, the audience is more appreciative, information is conveyed in a more useful manner, and I don't have to deal with what can only be described as the "ridiculous political atmosphere" that tends to accompany more open forums in the development community.

Getting back to my original point: what have I been up to, professionally?

Well, first of all, I've taken the role of CTO at Nylon Technology very seriously and am trying to rise to that challenge. There are some technical challenges of course, but my greatest challenges are in growing as an executive and manager. What's particularly difficult sometimes is "letting go of the code"... something I'll write about in detail another time.

I have been doing a decent amount of internal development at Nylon to support our internal and commercial needs. I find this particularly exciting, as it's given me to develop things I've always wanted to... and most importantly HOW I've always wanted to. There is a definite possibility that we will be releasing some of this code to the public.

To grow as a developer as well as to be the best CTO I can be at Nylon Technology, I've also been spending more time with technologies other than CF. We are definitely largely a CF shop, but also do quite a fair bit of PHP and Flash (rich multimedia projects). I've also taught myself Powershell which, by it's nature, included learning much more about the .NET Framework. I'm still not a huge .NET fan, but Powershell itself is one of the coolest languages I've ever seen. Reminded me a lot of LISP in many ways, with some strong parallels to perl and python and even CF... and some nice new nuances of its own, of course. If you are into programming/scripting languages and/or are looking for the best way to administer Windows networks and machines, definitely check out Powershell.

I'm in the process of building a decent sized Flex talent pool in-house, and we've done several Flex projects and prototypes. We're also getting started on what, by my estimation, is definitely the most high profile project that I've ever worked on and, in all likelihood, will be the most high profile project on the web built entirely with Flex and CF. I can't say anything more about that at the moment, but it is very high profile and the contract has been signed, so you'll definitely hear more about it in the future. I can't wait to talk about that!

I've also built new development and staging environments at Nylon, complete with source control and a web-based server admin and project-build (deployment) interface created by yours truly. This is part of a slow introduction of new development methodologies and project management policies and procedures.

Yes, I've been busy... and what I've said here only scratches the surface. More to come (much more) including, among other things, my thoughts about the future of ColdFusion.