Breakout Session with CF'ers Damon & Mike

Sunday, Oct 16 (pm) - Ryan

Towards the end of the Community College (for user group managers and possibly team mm people) we had a long breakout session with key staffers at MM. We separated into 5 or 6 groups based on product lines. I moved into the adjoining room to have a chat with Damon Cooper and Mike Niemer. About 20 of us pulled up chairs and chatted, gave feedback and asked questions about CF.

Mike stressed how helpful it is if we vote on bugs (for those in official betas) so that they knew which bugs were important to the user base. Michael Smith (of Teratech, CFUnited and the Maryland CFUG) suggested we also go to www.cfbughunt.org to vote on bugs. Mike wants us also to make suggestions for features and enhancement requests via the official Wish Lists.

A brief discussion on Verity and a request for a Spider feature was made.

Mike attempted to politely refer to accumulated code as a 'repository',

and Damon chimed in 'cesspool!'. MM has gigabytes of code they use for regression testing, counting frequency of tag usage over time, etc. They appreciate more code if you have applications available. The cesspool includes apps from 100+ customers, most of which are huge.

Debugging was chatted about and a reference to seefusion.com was made.

We talked about the documentation on the MM site, database drivers, etc.

The content was ad-hoc in nature and we enjoyed the group discussion. More time would have been nice, but there should be ample opportunity to cover this in the next few days.

Notice the nice black/orange/gray back packs at our feets? All Max attendees received a backpack with handouts, a folder and pen inside. The user group managers also received a very nice, high end duffel bag! It is a good thing I brought a medium size suitcase and hanging bag, enough space for the extras. (I'm staying in LA an additional week)

It is definately nice getting direct face time in a small group with engineering staff at Macromedia. I hope this contact continues once the borg...er...Adobe completes the acquisition.

Partial view of the conference center. The Hilton & Mariot hotels are next door and the lessor hotels are down the street. Mine, a Days Inn is just down the street and around the corner, 7 minute walk. I hope it stops raining by 7:30 or so when the sessions end! If not, I might have to hang around here and by someone a beer and ask questions about pet projects and coding problems.