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Michaela Light 0:03
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Kishore balakrishna from Adobe. And we're gonna be talking about ColdFusion development week 2021. She's coming up in 19 days as we're doing this recording probably less days when you actually listen to this episode. And we're going to be revealing all the speakers and topics are new and talking about why all ColdFusion developers worldwide go to this event. Welcome Kishore
here we got a script.
How you doing? Doing great, so fabulous. The sun has come out now. So fabulous day. For those of you don't know, Kishore, he's the principal Product Marketing Manager for ColdFusion Adobe. And he also you know, he's the voice of the customer his forte, you know, if you have concerns or questions, you can always direct them to him. And he talks to a lot of organizations who use cold fusion to find out you know, what they're doing with it.
All kinds of things there and he's coming to us live from Bangla through India. So
welcome, Kishore.
Kishore Balakrishnan 1:15
Thanks.
yes, stay, stay, stay, stay healthy. Keep, you know, keep doing good things we call fusion, by the way that those who don't know it just in case you think Kishore is like a marketing propellerhead. Really, he did a computer science degree. So he actually understands all this cold fusion stuff. I started working with cold fusion way back in 98, or sorry, around 2000. And I
didn't get a chance to get into it. But yes, I knew about cold fusion at that time. So
Michaela Light 1:51
that's great. Alright. So what exactly is cold fusion developer week?
Kishore Balakrishnan 2:03
Oh, coefficient developer week is actually always an online event wherein we have a lot of sessions, which typically used to span over a week. But since everyone is working from home, we thought like, you know, spanning everything over a week's time is too much. So this year, we just made it only for three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So it's a three day event, which has eight sessions every day, two tracks, eight sessions. So you have four sessions in a single track. And Baden waterkeepers, you know, one after the other, because people are at home, there's no point in having session stat. I eat one after the other. So what we are done as it's one session, then you get a break an hour to catch up on your mails, or, like in my case, spend some time with my son. So that's what it is. And it's also a place where you could meet up with other developers, or virtually, and you also have a lot of sponsors available right now we have close to 10 sponsors, you could, you know, you could hop on to their booth, see what they have to offer. And if you if you need to talk to someone, there's a ping mechanism in belt into the booth. So you could ping the both representative and the healed you and him could have a either a video conference or online chat, whatever is it that you want to do. And it's also a great place where you could ask a lot of questions and get a lot of goodies as well in the process. In so it's not only you know, you're just sitting there and learning new stuff, but you also could get a lot of goodies, by just participating in the sessions.
Michaela Light 4:11
Well, that's good to hear, because I think people are a little zoomed out from watching online webinars, you know, whatever technology is being used for that. So it's nice that you can interact with other ColdFusion developers. What about the ColdFusion engineering team? Will we be able to ask them questions? Oh, yeah,
Kishore Balakrishnan 4:27
definitely. You know, Corp engineering team is always up there to you know, always ready to talk to developers and any questions you throw at them, they'll always come back to you with answers. So they'll also be there as well. That will also be there. Cool.
Michaela Light 4:46
So if anyone has some something they're concerned about, or the something they're having, you know, an issue with like, or even a suggestion for the next version of ColdFusion. They could bring that up and chat with the the actual team
Kishore Balakrishnan 5:00
That's a good point that you made Mikayla. So we are just starting out on, you know, developing features for 20 for the next version. So if you have anything that you think needs to get into the version now is the right time, you know, you could always drop me a mail, or you could always contact the alias of Adobe [email protected]. And we'll make sure that we will get back to you.
Michaela Light 5:28
Excellent. So you're using the the same online platform that used for CF summit online last year, right, I guess called vertex or something like that V Comm. V conflicts. And that seemed to work really well. You had over 1000 people live, I think last time and you had over 3000 watching the recording. So are you doing recordings this time? Or?
Kishore Balakrishnan 5:58
Yes, all the recordings will be available. So and summit, we had close to 6000 registrations. Wow. Around 3800 people attended at least one or at least two sessions was at least two sessions.
Michaela Light 6:13
Wow. So what's amazing, and where they all from the United States or other countries, or
Kishore Balakrishnan 6:20
most were from the United States, followed by India. And surprisingly, there were a lot of registrations from Paris and Germany as well. Hmm.
Michaela Light 6:32
Maybe I know, the CF camp used to happen in Germany. I hope it comes back when when was crazy travel stuff ends. But it's great to hear that people in France, taking interest in cold fusion again, because I know for a while it kind of dropped down there. So very cool. So for the ColdFusion developers and managers listening, why should they attend CF dev week? Do you think?
Kishore Balakrishnan 7:00
It tells you what are the new things? particularly from a keynote perspective, it tells you what are the new things that are going to come up? In the next next version, or at least what is it that we are planning on doing in the next version, and for coefficient developers, they'll get a chance to deep dive into what are the new features of cF 2021. And for the managers, it also tells gives some sessions like you know, what is the CIOs take on full fruition? Or what should they be looking out for like, Mark is doing one amazing session about that. And also, it's also a good place where you could talk about, you know, learn new stuff, like we have sessions, from folks who are assur gurus. And we have sessions from AWS specialists like Sammy Hoda is doing a session on what's new in AWS. So as a web developer, I think you shouldn't be missing out on such amazing sessions. This is one place where you where you will be able to get amazing information about AWS as your and we have a rockstar lineup of speakers, you know, speakers, whom I have, like Ben Nadal is talking at this developer week. And you we have Sammy hood, I am the I think these are the guys who used to talk regularly at the conferences, and it's great of them that they had taken the time. I know you guys, I know those guys are extremely busy. But, you know, they have again decided to participate in the event. So it was amazing that they could join our events.
Michaela Light 8:58
That's great. We'll go through the topics and speakers in more detail in later in the episode. But I'm kind of curious, you know, how did you guys pick who the speakers and topics would be?
Kishore Balakrishnan 9:13
So typically, for CF summit, we have a call for speakers and everything. But this time, we didn't have the bandwidth or the time to do that. So because we had a release, and we had all this crazy things happening. So what we did was the content Committee, which kind of which comprises of Dan, Brian class Danielson, Brian class, Mark Takata, who's our evangelist, Alicia. So we, we thought like, Okay, what would be the good topics for folks to listen to, because all this will be recorded and will be available throughout so we chose the topics and we Then to the speakers to ask them saying that, Hey, will you be willing to talk about the topics? So while they said like, yes, most of them said yes. And a couple of them said no, because of they had some prior things that they had to do.
Michaela Light 10:19
Well, that's great that that you involved two people from a cold fusion community and your topic selection committee. For those who don't know, both Dan Wilson and blind Brian class, longtime cold fusion community members, so good that you take that input in
Kishore Balakrishnan 10:37
making that happen, and used to run and say DEF CON. So yes, I think events is nothing new to him.
Michaela Light 10:44
Indeed. Yeah. I hope that comes back in the future. But we shall see.
Kishore Balakrishnan 10:49
I think we all should start pressurizing Dan to do that. I have been asking him, every time I get an opportunity, I always ask him, I always bring this up slightly and say like, hey, when is the next NC DEF CON gonna happen? So I think all of us should start asking them when, whenever we should, whenever we talk to.
Michaela Light 11:13
Well, I'll let him know that as well when I next talk to him. So why why do you think it's, you know, important that people attend the event? You know, what?
Kishore Balakrishnan 11:29
What is it they're
Michaela Light 11:30
gonna miss out if they don't come to this, at least some of the sessions?
Kishore Balakrishnan 11:36
You know, what, as I told before, so all of the features that have been in 2021, that are introduced in 2021, will be discussed in more detail.
Michaela Light 11:48
What are the key features, because not everyone's using cold fusion 2021, we recently ran the state of the cold fusion union survey. And I think cold fusion 2018 is still the most popular flavor of cold fusion, and 2021 does have a significant number of people using it, but it's still not got fully adopted. Yeah, because what are they missing at least 2021.
Kishore Balakrishnan 12:10
So you know, in enterprise space, it takes a lot of time for people to move to the new version, because all the apps that needs to be tested again, but the newer version, and then it needs to get deployed. So a couple of sessions that we have, most of the sessions will have some flavor of 2021. So if you look at it, Mark is doing one session, which talks about, you know, the how to build single page applications using Corporation. So he's going to talk about couple of some of the new features. That is there. And we'll also be talking about what are the new scaling enhancements that we are done in 2021?
Michaela Light 13:03
Does it run faster than ColdFusion, 2016 or 2018?
Kishore Balakrishnan 13:09
It definitely runs faster than 2018 2016. But now, I think 2018 comparatively, it's the same amount of performance output that you get. And you know, that we had reduced the installer size quite drastically. Because
Michaela Light 13:27
Yeah, I heard it went from a gigabyte down to what's it down to now?
Kishore Balakrishnan 13:32
I think around 440 Mb or something like
Michaela Light 13:35
that. Wow. So it loads up a lot faster, which is yes, people do.
Kishore Balakrishnan 13:43
Yeah. And we also did a lot with respect to, you know, automation, and how to build a CI CD pipeline using code. So Brian will be talking about how do you automate your workflows with 2021. And we also have a session from the, from this thing, which talks about what are the new cloud features that we have introduced and to focus and we'll be talking about no SQL, or no SQL enhancements that we have done in 2021?
Michaela Light 14:21
I mean, for me, I think the two big things, you know, it's multi cloud support, so you don't get locked into one cloud vendor. And then also microservice support, like you were saying with a smaller footprint for the loading. I mean, there's a lot of new language features to check out so and of course, as always, the security is gold standard. of it's got that security's are who works there at Adobe who make sure the developers never write any insecure code.
Kishore Balakrishnan 14:56
That is it. And also Pete always keeps us honest. You know, we Yeah, his obligations, and he always keeps us honest. Guys. Yeah. And we also at this time, we also have another interesting speaker from veracode, who will be talking about security in general about how security should be looked at in enterprise plays. So that is something which will be. That's also one session, which even Personally, I'm looking forward to. Murray mango was the speaker and I'm looking forward to that session, just to understand, you know, what do other enterprises look at from a security perspective?
Michaela Light 15:39
Excellent, very cool. Well, let's just talk a bit more in detail about topics. Now. I've listed them all out in the show notes on the terror tech site. And you can also find them on the CF dev week site as well. So so we'll put a link to the ColdFusion dev week website where you can register as well, in the show notes. So we've got Jean Carlo Gomez, he's going to be talking about using WebSockets. So it's great way to do asynchronous communication in your ColdFusion apps. And then Mike Collins is going to be talking about scaling your apps. Mike is a real expert on both scaling and supporting apps. And then Corbin crunch. Lee is going to be talking about using ColdFusion API's in Expo mobile apps. Louis mahana from autists is going to be talking about building modern web apps with content box. cms. Brian zappi, is going to be talking about using the API manager.
Kishore Balakrishnan 16:49
One is about the API manager. The second one is about how do you build a, you know ci CD pipeline? The non the new enhancements that were done with the installer and Corp 2021. Release.
Michaela Light 17:04
Excellent. And then Pete free tag, as he mentioned earlier, he's going to be talking about how you can secure your ColdFusion apps. And he has several, you know, third party products for improving ColdFusion security as well worth checking those out. If you haven't looked at them. Then we've got the cloud features in 2021. I'm not sure who's covering that is that
Kishore Balakrishnan 17:30
it will be from the engineering team,
Michaela Light 17:32
the engineering team, okay, we'll get a whoever that's going to be doing that. And then Charlie Earhart, famous ColdFusion, developer, CFO, for one side, been a great resource. And he's going to be talking about ColdFusion at 25. Because it's your we celebrated the 25th anniversary earlier this year. And how it's really not old, it's modern. The talks actually titled not the kid most have stuck in their minds. Yeah, and then, and he's always a great speaker, for chock full of
Kishore Balakrishnan 18:14
this session.
Michaela Light 18:16
No. Then we've got Ray bang, go, as you mentioned, talking about security from more external point of view, Sammy holder, talking about what's new in Adobe web services in 2021, which you can use very easily from ColdFusion. Now, Burke, Holland, talking about Azir, tight, I was wrong about this year. So I guess he didn't like it. And then he embraced it.
Kishore Balakrishnan 18:41
No, he is part of the assure team. So he is as your team. So it talks about his perspective of how things changed when he looked at as your four years lag. And by the time he joined, and what what basically talks about his learning with using with Azure, so I think you should if anyone is planning on moving to Azure or consuming services in Azure, I think that's one of the sessions which you shouldn't miss.
Michaela Light 19:13
Through. Cool. Yeah, you're covering a lot of the big cloud vendors here. So that's very, and those are the two current cloud platforms supported by cF 2021 as your an AWS or do you support any other ones?
Kishore Balakrishnan 19:28
For the time being this these are the two that we are supporting. But the idea is to have a couple of other platforms or to support that. No, before the end of this year or maybe. Cool.
Michaela Light 19:42
Well, though, AWS and this year are the two top enterprise cloud platforms. So you know, I think you've covered a lot of the territory with that. There Mike Brandt. He's going to be talking about the JVM and how you can improve ColdFusion performance by attuning that Ben Nadal is going to be talking about feature flags and how they change everything about product development. Ray Camden, used to be the CFO, Jedi Master. And he's going to be talking about extending PDF capabilities with Adobe document services. Now, Brian class, he's going to be talking about developing apps with queues and pub location and subscribe mechanisms, which translates to Sq S. S, ns, rabbit mq and some other things. So modern way to develop there, David briars is going to be talking about ColdFusion modernization challenges how you can improve your legacy code while retaining your sanity. And there's a lot of legacy code out there. So that's an important talk, I think. And then mark Takata, the new ColdFusion evangelist, he's going to be doing two talks Firstly, about the CIOs perspective on ColdFusion 2021, looking at the numbers behind it. And then he's going to talk about rad SPSS, with CSS and JavaScript. So and then David Tattersall is rounding out the regular speakers with how to become an application superhero, reduce your technical debt impact and keep your applications performing as they should, which I'm imagining will involve fusion reactor, I don't. Sure. I think yes, August. And then ash, Ashish Kok, who is one of the leaders in the ColdFusion development team, he's going to be talking about ColdFusion 2021. And the next version, do you know what the name of the next version is going to be? Or is that depending on the year it gets released in or
Kishore Balakrishnan 21:54
it will be depending on the year that it gets released?
Michaela Light 21:57
Okay, well, I'm just gonna make a guess it's either going to be cF 2022, or cF 2023 is my guess. But we'll see. And then, you mentioned you have 10, sponsors, people can talk to me about who are those who are the sponsors? Because I'm not seeing those on the website? Maybe I'm missing it somewhere.
Kishore Balakrishnan 22:22
We still haven't put up that details on the this thing. It's the same culprits.
Michaela Light 22:30
All right. Well, I'll fill it in in the show notes later, but terror attack is one of the sponsors. I'm pretty sure autists is and
Kishore Balakrishnan 22:39
others are stickers. So you have all the usual suspects in there. And All right, thank you so much, to all the sponsors to promoting the event as well.
Michaela Light 22:51
Absolutely. We want you know, I mean, I think this is a great event. You know, I'd recommend it, I'll get to how much it costs in a minute. But it's not a lot. No, and I think, you know, everyone can improve their ColdFusion skills and be aware of what's You know, they're missing out on in ColdFusion. Because so many new things get added to ColdFusion. It's hard to keep up with everything. So this is an opportunity to refresh your skills. And just be aware, sometimes I find it helps to speed and aware a feature exists, because then when you're doing a project, you're like, Oh, yeah, I could do that. But if you don't even know it exists, you can't take advantage. So excited. It's good. Now, we mentioned you know, Mark is the new ColdFusion evangelist, what exactly does that mean? What What is he doing?
Kishore Balakrishnan 23:53
Mark is a developer evangelist. So his role is, you know, talking to customers talking to developers and see what how easy he could you know, how he could change the life of the developers how, what are the things that Adobe needs to do to help Corp developer become productive as soon as possible?
Michaela Light 24:19
Okay, so he it sounds like he has two roles. One is listening to what concerns developers have and and making those voices heard back in the development team and the marketing team. And then the second one is, is also I assume, speaking like he is at this event, and probably other events, to explain to people why cold fusion is wonderful. is definitely cool. Now is I remember in the cold fusion summits, you often had a day where people could take cold fusion certification. Is that part of this? So how does that work these days?
Kishore Balakrishnan 24:59
No corporations. certification has been taken online this year. So we took it.
Michaela Light 25:06
So you don't have to wait. You could take it tomorrow.
Kishore Balakrishnan 25:09
You could take it anytime you want. Okay, so go to adobe.com slash bonefishing, you will see Adobe Certified Professional tab over there. And that will provide you with all the details
Michaela Light 25:24
and how much the certification costs to do.
Kishore Balakrishnan 25:28
We were thinking of pricing it around $2,000. Then he said,
Michaela Light 25:33
and it's 149. Really?
Kishore Balakrishnan 25:35
It's $149.
Michaela Light 25:39
Okay, cool. And that's not just the certification. It's got a whole bunch of training videos, and yes, so
Kishore Balakrishnan 25:47
on 50, you get access to a rod post or on potty training videos. And it also includes the cost of taking the exam as well.
Michaela Light 25:58
Great. And that's a way to show folks that you're up to date with your cold fusion. And, you know, even if you've been doing cold fusion for years, I found when I've taken these certifications I like, you know, new stuff that I didn't know about. So there are definite benefits to doing that. Yeah, well, when is ColdFusion developer week?
Kishore Balakrishnan 26:22
It's 22nd to 25th of this month.
Michaela Light 26:26
Alright, so that's a Wednesday through Friday, Wednesday to
Kishore Balakrishnan 26:29
Thursday.
Michaela Light 26:32
I thought it was three days before? Yeah.
Kishore Balakrishnan 26:35
Sorry, Tuesday, Tuesday
Michaela Light 26:36
to Thursday. Sorry, QC to Thursday. That's what is I knew was three days, and other sessions all US time or some in European time or other timezone. So
Kishore Balakrishnan 26:48
we did that and summit. But since the recordings are going to be available immediately, the sessions are mostly in us are all in your standard.
Michaela Light 27:00
Okay, so it might be a little late in the afternoon or any early evening.
Kishore Balakrishnan 27:05
In the afternoon for folks in Europe and early evening for folks in India.
Michaela Light 27:13
Cool. Well, that's good. When do the recordings come out? For people who are the
Kishore Balakrishnan 27:19
recording should be out immediately, like you take the first session? I think, by the time you take the second session, the first session?
Michaela Light 27:26
Wow, that's impressive. Because I know in some online events, you have to wait weeks to see the recordings. So that's very handy. So and then, let's just talk about how much this cost? How much does it cost to attend.
Kishore Balakrishnan 27:46
It's an online event. So all we require is your time.
Michaela Light 27:50
So it's free, no cost. So you just have to go to Adobe dot v contracts.com. And I'll put that URL in the show notes on the site. And just register and then you'll get an email letting you get into the conference. Yeah. Are there any other Adobe ColdFusion events planned for this year? Or?
Kishore Balakrishnan 28:15
No, unfortunately, we will not be having any in person events. But we'll definitely be having Adobe co creation summit sometime in December, which will again be online.
Michaela Light 28:27
Excellent. That was a great event last year. So recommend that to folks. And I'm pretty sure autists is doing a developer week or some other, you know, books coldbox related event. Some points. Yeah, but I'm forgetting what date they're doing it. And they, they were they did send out a survey saying Should we do an in person event? So I don't know what they concluded from that.
Kishore Balakrishnan 28:50
But I would like to hear the feedback from that. But yes, we are all missing the person events. I could say I could say that.
Michaela Light 28:57
Yes. Yeah, I don't know where they are. I don't think we're gonna do it in Texas, or I mean, they've done it in Houston, Texas, before in Texas is pretty, you know, open up this point. So but I don't know what they concluded. So let's just wrap up this interview by talking about how cold fusion is doing from the business point of view.
Kishore Balakrishnan 29:23
from a business point of view corporation is doing pretty well. So over the last couple of years, we have been able to get in a lot more new, attract a lot more new customers with a pay management fees and also folks. So I can't give you the exact numbers but we definitely achieve 20% more than our target last year. And the first two quarters of this year also has been really good for us from a business perspective. Well, right but you know, without getting Your customers on boarded, and wised with the help of existing customers as well. So, business has been doing really great. And once this pandemic is over, we are looking forward to meeting our customers face to face.
Michaela Light 30:16
Well, I'm looking forward to meeting you and the rest of the Adobe team at some future event. In person. I really enjoyed visiting the headquarters of the web development team in Bengaluru in India, and getting to see how y'all do stuff there. So and enjoying the great,
Kishore Balakrishnan 30:38
it was really great having you here. You should definitely make it
Michaela Light 30:43
happy happy to visit India at any time I actually got myself. It's quite I don't know if you know this, but it actually a lot of paperwork to get a visa to go to India. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably the same for you going to the US, right? You have to fill out all these forms. But
Kishore Balakrishnan 31:03
at least Okay, once you get that it's for like 10 years or five years. So
Michaela Light 31:08
you can get one year but I'd pay the extra to get a five year one because I knew I wanted to come back.
Kishore Balakrishnan 31:13
Oh, nice. That's great. You don't have to do the paperwork again.
Michaela Light 31:18
I don't have to do the paperwork again. So I think it was actually I the last I was in that this was the second visit I've made to India as last there, I think in 1982 or something. And back then it was all paper. But now when I went it was all in bank, Bangalore airport. It was all electronic and you know, barcodes and it was very efficient. So I think India's made a great leap forward in the last 40 years. Exactly. It's quite impressive. Are there any other things we should look out for in ColdFusion? land this year?
Kishore Balakrishnan 31:55
There are a lot of things which you should look out for. But I will wait for the keynote to come out. So you should definitely hear the keynote. Because we'll be talking about a lot of great stuff that's going to come out. Excellent.
Michaela Light 32:09
So if folks want to find you online, well, what was one of the best ways to do that?
Kishore Balakrishnan 32:17
My available on Twitter. It's kisho 30 one.com. Or the easiest way to reach out to me just drop me a mail. It's [email protected]. And I'll make sure that I'm I make sure that I respond to each and every mail that I get.
Michaela Light 32:36
Excellent. Well appreciate all you're doing in marketing and putting events like this together for cold fusion. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Kishore Balakrishnan 32:47
Thanks again. It's always a pleasure to be here.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
