Read the show notes and download the episode here
Michaela Light 0:02
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Gavin pickin from autists solutions. And we're gonna be talking all about into the box ColdFusion conference 2022. Lots of new things happening this year. And if you haven't been to enter the box before, you're going to learn why you should be going. Welcome, Gavin.
Gavin Pickin 0:22
Thank you for having me.
Michaela Light 0:24
It's nice to see you back on the show. And for those of you don't know, Gavin is a ColdFusion.
expert. He does all kinds of things JavaScript, Vue js, Docker. He does trainings and podcasts. In fact, he's one of the CO hosts of the modernize or die podcast along with Brad and a few other autistic Tony ins or whatever the correct phrase is for people what they think is the way they say, or Terzian Zoo. I love it. He's originally from New Zealand, but he's now a Californian. So welcome, Gavin.
Gavin Pickin 1:03
Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time. And yeah, it's good to be on the other side of the podcast once. Absolutely, yes, it's. So maybe we should answer for people who don't know who've been asleep for the last nine years. What exactly is into the box. So enter the box. Basically, it's a conference that order started to try and give people an opportunity to see more or to box products. So before into the box even started, we had this thing called called Box developer week. So it was an online conference kind of thing. And we had three or four sessions a day, five days in a week. So we're like 20, sessions where, you know, orders and then a lot of community members, because back back in 2012 2013, when all of these sort of things started, Luis and Brad were the two big auto museums. And then we had a lot of community members that were out there. And so they'd come on and talk about all the different stuff. So we talked about log box and cold box and wire box and test box on you know, all the boxes that we had back in the older days. And then we got to the point where we had more boxes than whole box had. And so we started the oldest developer week. And because obviously conferences didn't want us to take over and have half the half the conference talking about cold box or command box or whatever. We thought, well, we should start our own little conference. So what we did is we did like a one day pre conference before CF objectives. And so we started back
in 20. Well, I guess 2013 2014. But this 2022 is the ninth edition. So we've been going strong for a long time. And after a few years, the day before CIF objective, you know, we wanted to have the base expand because one day wasn't enough, we had one day of into the box, and then there was three days of CF objective. So we're like we can't do a whole week or two days into the box and three days, you know, see if objective. So we're like, you know what? It's big enough. It stands on its own leg. So let's, let's break out and Louisa just recently moved to Houston. And so we decided to, you know, host it there. So 2016 Houston had as the first into the box, it wasn't piggybacked on to another conference. And, you know, it went really well. And so,
Michaela Light 3:27
did I remember, I think I went the second year, I think I may have missed first year, but it was an amazing event gammon about 200 people last year, I don't know how many people are expecting this year, any ideas or
Gavin Pickin 3:41
pretty close to I don't think we quite had 200 people. The first one there, but you know, we basically, we break even that's our goal with this is just to like, you know, basically make a great conference, get a lot of people who want to, you know, get there and if we can break even, we're happy. You know, we've had the budget, Adobe has to throw money everywhere, and you know, and take it as a big marketing loss. But I think, yeah, this year, we're hoping for the 150 or 200. I mean, we like the fact that it's small and cozy, and you get to know people get time to talk to everybody, you know, so we're okay with that. But it's a it's enough peace, very intimate.
Michaela Light 4:20
If you want to talk to any other ColdFusion developers who are there or our people who have written these open source box ColdFusion pro products you can hit them up in the corridor track or over lunch or breakfast. It's very accessible. Yeah, that's what we like about it. Everyone was everyone was very friendly with the few times I've been there and I've heard great things from people I've interviewed attendees have been there. Yeah, for sure. And for those listening first of all, two things I want to bring up first of all, you you may be like box What Not everyone is heard of or used any of these box products. So I would like to do on that. But the other thing we're going to talk about a bit is this is not only box or all these things, there's a whole bunch of I think you call it community track, or there's a whole bunch of ColdFusion and database topics that have nothing to do with the box stuff. So if you're wondering, should you stay tuned in is this of any interest you if you're not, you know, a box? fanatic? The answer is yes. And by the way, if you're not a box fanatic, you probably should, you know, at least try out command box, for example. Yeah, and what some of the other ones. And
Gavin Pickin 5:37
that's the thing is, you know, with the conference, it's a great way to have a look at a lot of different things. And you know, usually people have heard of coldbox, you know, it's one of the big three MVC frameworks still left in ColdFusion, you know, call boxes, according to your survey, which we'll talk about, in another episode coming up the, you know, state of the CFE union survey, PO boxes, the bigger most used framework, framework one is still up there, but you know, it doesn't have the same support now that Sean Paul fields moved on, and then see if wheels has been revived in that doing well, too. So, you know, as far as frameworks go cold boxes, you know, one of the big ones out there and for a long time, everyone thought if you have if you don't use cold box, you know, all this doesn't mean anything, but like you said, command box, you don't have to use any other box product command box is a great CLI tool that lets you get up and running with servers and build your own commands and confusion and just does a million things, which is you can use that with anything. And forge box is a package management, you know, suite which works with command box and you know, see if wheels people are using it to download their plugins and stuff. And you know, the guys over preside CMAs have all their everything running through forge box, box box is a community product, and you don't have to use coldbox stuff to use it. And even with codebox, you don't have to use PO box to be able to use wire box, if you want to do dependency injection, or if you want to improve your logging we love box, there's a bunch of stuff that we build that doesn't need coldbox runs and let me know, in the dark, basically, of all those other things. There's a bunch of great things out there. And so this conference allows us to dive deeper and really give you a better look at all those tools. And then we've got a bunch of community people speaking about other things, too. And you know, we're talking about Vue js and JavaScript and databases and caching. And, uh, you know, and there's a lot of great topics from a lot of people. And yeah, it's a really good, really good thing. But, you know, we kind of needed our own conference, because we got so much that we're doing and pushing forward with the community and with the community support, we're able to do that. And so, you know, because at first people thought of us, it's called box and documentation, that's kind of what what we're known for the back in 2012, when all the big coefficient people left, everyone was going to have languages because they needed a CLI, they needed a, you know, a package manager, they're missing all these tools, they wanted better testing, you know, they want a better documentation generation tools. And so what have said, well, we can do this with ColdFusion. So why don't we build them. And so we started building a lot of these tools. And like I said, with community help, because without the community, we couldn't do this. We built up all these tools. And you know, through open source, we've got a lot of great things to show off. And, you know, and again, the conference, two days, we have a day of workshop beforehand, we couldn't fit it all in, we've been thinking about going to a three day conference for awhile. But this year, we changed it up a little bit. We'll talk about that here in a little bit, too. Yeah,
Michaela Light 8:35
well, there's some exciting new things, actually, it's very different from previous year. So I'm very interested in what you've done. I think it's quite radical for a conference, this is more of a conference than even cfunited was or CF summit in Las Vegas is with what you're doing ahead of time, but we'll talk about that in a minute. I do want to say from my experience of attending into the box that it's you know, if you're a bit skeptical about some of these box products, you're not really quite clear, it's a great chance to dip your toe in the water, talk to other people using them, see the experts talking about it, and finally get oh, that's why I could be using this tool. Here's an opportunity for my team to use these things. And the other related thing which you kind of touched on there, you know, you've got we've got the language CFML but the ecosystem around a programming language is as important or more important for success in modern development, as is the language features and really ColdFusion with all the innovations autists and other people have done in the ecosystem. The other major ones I can think of the you know, the extensions for VS code that you know, Matthew Brown, he has some stuff. Yeah, yeah. So and then you know, there are there are commercial products that Pete free tag insecurity area with this hack my CF and fix Nader, and all his innovations, you're doing lambda lambda code in cold fusion. And then the fusion reactor guys have a lot of innovations to the point. So the point I want to make here to people listening is if you're doing, you know, old school ColdFusion, and you're not using modern ecosystem tooling, you're kind of missing out on most of the benefit of ColdFusion in 2022. And this conference is a chance to see that in action, talk to people who are doing modern stuff and incorporate that back into your own development environment. Yep. And
Gavin Pickin 10:39
she did a series on the online CF meetup about, you know, when did you roll your own versus build, you know, versus using a third party library and how to use third party libraries in ColdFusion, you know, sort of done a whole basic series on how to make those decisions, because a lot of people are scared to use third parties, because, you know, there's pros and cons of everything. So I tried to lay it out in a way that, you know, here are the decision criteria you should look out for when deciding to build a tool. And, you know, the guys on the working code podcast actually talked about that just recently about, you know, some of the pros and cons and how they make the decision. And it's something that people need to think about more. So yeah, if you go look on Charlie's online, CF meet up, there was about three in a row that I did, all about, you know, third party libraries, you know, should you build your own versus use that and you know, how to use them as well, you know, whether Java or Forgeworld packages, or just someone's GitHub repo or just, you know, so
Michaela Light 11:37
that's it, we'll add those links into the show notes for people listening, which you can find the Terra tech.com for this podcast episode. And I think that's a great point. You know, in the State of the Union survey, we had a question about, does your organization even allow you to use open source products, and I was blown away that not every organization even thinks that's okay. I mean, guys, Wake up and smell the coffee. It's currently 2022. And we're recording this episode whenever you people are listening. And if you're not using some open source code or tools, you're it's like, you're, I can't think of the right metaphor. It's like you're trying to drive your car with square wheels. Like the ride is bumpy, you know?
Gavin Pickin 12:27
Yeah. And understand there's a lot of security implications with bad actors and everything. And, you know, that's why we'll be working with Pete Friday to try and even improve the security of things up on forge box. And, you know, and there's obviously,
Michaela Light 12:40
what's Pete doing with you? Is he kind of scanning your code to make sure it's not malicious?
Gavin Pickin 12:45
Well, I mean, that's the thing is, we're looking at those types of options for people, because some people, they have to have that and, you know, P has things like fixed inator. And so we're trying to work, work with him, and, you know, just bitter code passing and everything. But, you know, we're pretty locked down with forge box, and we're not a big target, like NPM and stuff. So, you know, that's something we're, you know, we're aware of, that people can be concerned about, and, you know, like bigger companies, sometimes they can use open source, but they've got to fill out a bunch of paperwork. And, you know, there's a whole procedure. So it's one of those things, they have to decide what they can and can't do. And the licensing this, there's a lot to it. And again, each have their own, but it's like, there are a lot of benefits. And like you said, you know, if you are able to, there's a lot of things out there that you can, you know, save yourself a lot of time and energy and effort and get a better product by focusing on your core product, and not worrying about how to implementation implement, oh, Wolf, or, you know, some decrypted password library, you know, because we've done that, you know, don't do it over and over again, don't reinvent the wheel. And so, yeah, like you said, there's, there's definitely a lot of opportunities there. It's 2022. That's easy enough to do. And again, we'll we'll link to those presentations, and I give you a lot of reasons why you should be using package management. And you know, and that's just one way to do it.
Michaela Light 14:08
Excellent. Now, I'm kind of curious, you know, you said this started off as a pre conference to CF objective. May I rest in peace, dead X conference, whatever, the Monty Python parents sketches. So, what why did you guys think it was best to make your own conference rather than continuing to run pre conferences? I know you touched on earlier, but I think there's some other things to bring out here.
Gavin Pickin 14:37
Yeah, I mean, really, another a lot of people have to make the decision when they go into a conference like okay, you know, family and work time, they can only get so much time off at once. And so if we've made it a pre conference, and did two days before a three day conference, most people aren't comfortable traveling for six or seven days if you travel before and after the conference, you know, and a company is listed likely to give someone five or six days off of work, you know, to do it. And you know, so it was one of those things and see projected wasn't cheap,
Michaela Light 15:07
I just want to interrupt that for people listening who think they're getting days off work, going to a conference is some of the hardest work you're going to do. Because you're gonna learn so much new stuff, your brain is, you know, gonna go on overdrive, and you're gonna come back with a zillion things you can use at work.
Gavin Pickin 15:25
Oh, no, it's definitely not a vacation. Well, it's time off from client work that they bill for. And so therefore, the boss, man will say, you know, you've got to make up that time, or that's because not only are they paying you for you to go to a conference, you know, you're possibly losing, you know, clients, if you have client work to do. So you're losing some billing time. And so that's something to be, you know, to consider, you know, like, audits isn't a huge company to so when we run this conference, you know, we've got to think about everyone who's gonna be there, not doing client work for a week, and we'd still do a large amount of client work just to sort of basically help fund our open source work, right, you know, like, we don't have, you know, so that's, that's always a balance. But again, like you said, it's not a vacation for you, you're there. You get to, you know, network with a lot of people, you'll get to learn a lot. And the first time I met all the everybody at CF objective way back in the day, I did a three day boot camp for PO Box, I did three days of CF objective, there was six days, yeah, my brain was hurting, but I was inspired, I was pumped up, I was ready to go. And now that's the great thing about a conference, but we wanted to like do our own so we could grow and we could do the things we wanted to do. And we didn't want to have to make someone choose, like, Okay, if they want to go to another conference, you know, maybe they'll they'll pick CF objective, because it was bigger, but also was a lot more expensive, too. It was like $1,000 for three days or something, it was not a cheap conference. And so then if they have to pay for our conference, which I think the first year we did, it was like 50 bucks, it was it was a steal, you know, because obviously, we just got to tag on a little room. And as we've grown, we've get to bigger events. But it's a really wanted to do that. And we wanted to have people be able to attend and a lot of people couldn't get the time off. And you know, and I said we have lots to talk about. And over the years, it's only grown and grown. So by 2016, you know, I think we're three years into it. And we're like, you know what, we think we can make this work. And so Luis did all the math and everything. And, you know, and we basically decided, let's give it a go, you know, we're hope that would work out. And we had a lot of a lot of great people show up. And some people weren't even box people, but they came to it because they were wanting to advance topics. And that's one thing that this conference office, you know, it's not how to, you know how to output something using CF output. It's not how to do the basic tag stuff. Like we're doing some deeper things, we got people who are presenting that use design patterns and other things like we, you know, that's one of the things we pride ourselves on audits. We don't just build something in the dark, you know, when every time someone builds something for auditors, we go out and study what are other languages doing? What are other frameworks doing? What are their best practices? How can that help help fusion? And how can we bring that back and make power ColdFusion more powerful. And so a lot of the things that you've seen lately, they're, you know, very similar to things that Laravel has been doing. And, you know, test box uses the same BDD structure, and everything, then Jasmine, and you know, in those aspects, test box labor testing libraries are using other languages, you know, like, we go to other conferences to learn whatever language is doing, and then bring that back, you know, so that's part of it, you know, we basically, we see this as a way to, you know, educate, and people really like that, you know, it's small and intimate, they get to talk to us and pick our brains about, you know, like, I don't use coldbox yet, how can I start using this, and we've sort of helped them sort of get a migration plan. And, you know, we're, we're really, no, I think we're really down and friendly. And you can talk to all the speakers before and after the sessions. And, you know, we can't Can't forget happy box, it's a great event, you know, but it's just a really good conference for that. But we go a little deeper, you know, so it's not just the cookie cutter sessions. And so people like that, when they go there, they're gonna really get a lot out of it. And, you know, the slides and the code is there and they can take it home and then, you know, get value out of it right away. And so it's not, it's not aimed at beginners. You know, we've had a few beginners come and they've still really enjoyed it. But you know, it's not like CF Summit, where sometimes you get to the sessions, and you don't learn as much because they're aimed at the very broad spectrum of, you know, welcome to ColdFusion you know, and so, we really dive deeper and that's something we pride ourselves on.
Michaela Light 19:42
It is a deep dive, though, you know, if you're newer to ColdFusion I still think you can learn valuable stuff. Certainly anyone who's intermediate is going to learn a lot and you know, even for advanced folks, you know, it's there's there's new releases of Box products, there's new techniques to use. There's always things to to learn. So, you know, it's pretty amazing what, what's in there. And you know, I think what I say to anyone who's you know, who's trying to convince their boss to send them look, yeah, you maybe you won't get, you know, work done for the you, the users at your company or clients, if you're an agency or, you know, if you're a freelancer, yes, you won't be billing for that week, but you're gonna make it up in the months following, because you will now be doing better code for your clients. And, you know, you'll be working more efficiently. I mean, I don't even think about whether I should send staff to this conference, because I just know, they come back inspired, excited about the language more productive. And you know, I think sometimes people in business forget that, you know, some of the, obviously, it's important to make dollars, but you've got to have fun with what you're doing and enjoy it. And it's so easy, what I see in not just ColdFusion developers, it's true in the whole IT industry, there's a lot of burnout that happens. And, you know, learning new things is one of the counter actions to avoiding burnout. The other one is not overdoing the amount of work you do and burning up candle above,
Gavin Pickin 21:26
because because they say that to us, like you don't get burnt out doing things you love, you get burnt out now doing things you have to do. And you know, so if you make it enjoyable, you make it fun. You know, it's you don't get burned out the same. I mean, trust me, I work way too hard. But I don't get burnt out the same because I really enjoy everything I get to do. You know, and so, it's really great. And so, I mean, I said, I've had a lot of people, that box people, they're referring with one people that still wanted to come and see. And they, they loved it, I mean, and you know, it's we're really proud that, that we put on the conference, and we get such good positive feedback, and we have people coming back time and again, and we've got some people that don't even have to ColdFusion anymore, and they still come to this conference, because, you know, they just get a kick out of everything we're doing. And they want to support the community and get, you know, talk to all those people that have made friends with. And so it's really cool, like we really enjoy throwing it to it's a good experience all around.
Michaela Light 22:26
It is and that you make a good point there cuz I was talking to some of the Lucy folks. And one way you can give back to open source is to support them in some way. In the case of Lucy, you can buy a support contract going forward, do you have a box support contract? Is that something you guys have?
Gavin Pickin 22:44
Yeah, we have our Patreon supporters. So that's how we decided to do that. So with Patreon, you know, we've got different levels of support. And basically at the bronze package level, we give you like a complimentary CF, forge box pro license and a CF cast license. So if you get that you want to support us, those are things you can subscribe to, as well. Or if you support us on Patreon, you get those as well once you hit bronze, and there's a few other perks too. But yeah, that's, that's basically the way we're trying to try to do that. And that helps fund the podcast. So the CFL news podcasts what you do weekly, you know, so that supports that. And then the next level of support from Patreon is basically paying for forge box, which is our package management site. And so we can, you know, pay for all the s3 packages and, and everything. So all the people downloading test box for their CI CDs, and you know, all the code they're putting up there. And so, you know, that's the next goal is sort of fully funded, because right now, you know, Otter still pays a good chunk of the money towards all that hosting everything, that's part of the thing we do for the community. So the more supporters we get on Patreon, the more orders can spend that money on other things in the community, you know, so we can do more open source, again, where we sort of, we have sort of the 8020 rule in our company, so 80% of our time, we try and split focus on client work. And then we use that to try and fund about 20% of our work to be able to, you know, work on coal box and content box, and, you know, command box and all the other tools, and you know, those types of things and see if cast is one of those things as well. And, you know, it's a great video library with a lot of free and paid content. But that itself is, you know, we got quite a few subscribers where it's starting to, like, you know, basically breakeven, so it can afford us to keep putting that content out. So we get new videos all the time. But yeah, so patreon.com/auto solutions, and you guys can, you know, choose a certain level and some of the higher levels if you guys are supporting us at a higher level. You know, we mentioned on the podcast, you can place on the website, and then some of the packages even have, you know, into the box Tickets are free and stuff like that. So there's a lot of cool perks and yeah, we've got quite a few supporters. I think we're about 36 supporters or something right now. And, you know, every week on the podcast, we read them out and mispronounce. names as well as we can.
Michaela Light 25:03
Yeah, I viewed one of your colleagues on the podcast about CF cast and my brain is blanking out. Eric, he
Gavin Pickin 25:11
was the one that built it was the Eric
Michaela Light 25:13
Eric Peters. I wanted to say, Pete, but I knew it. That wasn't his first. Eric Peterson, but it is all about Peterson. Yeah, yeah. So I'll put the link to that episode down there, see if cost is a great thing. All our developers at Terra Tech have a subscription to that, because there's like three or 400 training sessions on there. It's like a no brainer, it's sort of I call it Netflix for cold fusion. It's like, you know, on demand cold fusion training whenever you want.
Gavin Pickin 25:43
And we've been doing a lot of free stuff there, too. So like, we talked about the package management, I did a whole series on, you know, creating your first month's box package. And so that's free, because we want people to learn that, you know, but obviously, some of the more deeper topics or you know, higher end topics we have under the paid umbrella, but you also get all the old into the box video. So if you didn't make it the last year's end of the box, you can watch them all with a paid subscription. Or if you want to have the free subscription, just just buy a certain package for those libraries. But if you're, I think it's 25 bucks a month. And you know, basically, you get all the old into the box videos for the last three, four years, you've got a ton of other content. So yeah, I think it's a great value. And again, you're supporting authors who are building all these tools for the community. And, you know, it's just another way to support us. And you know, we appreciate that.
Michaela Light 26:32
Yeah, no, I recommend anyone is using Box products and found them useful, or anyone is using Lucy and find useful support the organizations and people who are doing that. And one way is to come to into the box where you can directly meet the people who do it or the other options we talked about. Now, why don't we look at who's going to be speaking this year? Can you tell us some of the people you're excited about their speaking?
Gavin Pickin 27:03
Yeah, I mean, there's quite a few other speakers where we have a lot of community speakers too. So at the actual end of the box, in person conference, I say that because I'm gonna explain something else in a minute. But we have Scott Steinbeck, which I've known for a long time. He's actually from my, from Bakersfield. And he actually took over a job when I left it. So he had to pick up all my legacy codes, I feel sorry for him, but he's a great speaker is going to be speaking on a couple of different things. He's, he does great things with like, just everything. So he's building an advanced PDF generation tool, forget bookmark down. And he's, you know, last year he spoke about Postgres database servers. We also have, like Nolan Urk, he's gonna be there speaking about web components and your CFML application. Abram Adams, I met way back at see if some CF objective, he's gonna be talking about chaos, which is a command box module he built for his company to do DevOps. And it's, it's crazy, some of the things he's talking about. He's trying to open source that he needs approval from his company, they actually release that, but he's going to be speaking about that. And then Sif stone is going to be doing a quickstart for CI CD automation on AWS. And then Shawn oden. This is more of a soft skills here, but his talk is all about. I'm just here for the t shirt. But it's basically about impostor syndrome. And so impostor syndrome is really, really big these days. You know, when you hear someone like Ben, they doubt which everybody in the ColdFusion community knows. And he gets this imposter syndrome to say, how can we get impostor syndrome like, he is like, beyond like, behind Ben Forta, like inrae Kamden. Like, Ben is the third one where everyone knows in the cold fusion world. So if someone like him can get impostor syndrome, then you know, anyone can. And so, Shawn's talking about that, and I love that title, I'm just here for the t shirt. But, uh, that's
Michaela Light 28:59
great. Yes, I think every year you've had something along, as well as the hard technical topics, new releases, and information. And you've always had at least one thing that covers, you know, the other side of being a developer. And, you know, because I think a lot of developers it can be quite a lonely profession, you know, you're in front of the computer a lot of the time. And there can be all kinds of mental illness and, or psychological issues that aren't often talked about, cuz a lot of developers aren't used to talking about that stuff.
Gavin Pickin 29:34
Yeah, there's a lot of stigma behind, you know, mental health in general and stuff. But yeah, there's, there's definitely a lot to it. But it's a good session. I think it'd be a good one. He's done them in the past. And yeah, they really do well, and usually we put them later in the day too, and your brains really mounted and you just kind of need a softer session. And you know, they're usually you know, a little humor and it's it's just good calm. then. So, yeah, we're excited to have him speaking again. And again, of course,
Michaela Light 30:05
Luis is going to be talking properly sharing all the new things coming out in your roadmap this year, I'm guessing. Yep. I'm sure Brad wood will be there speaking as well.
Gavin Pickin 30:18
Yep. So the the usual artists, people will be there. So Luis is going to be there with Brad wood. And then John Clawson is going to be there as well and myself will be speaking. But then some of the newer team members we've got. So we've been building our team of artists the last few years, and we're really grown a lot. And so you'll hear from Grant papalii, he's going to be talking about CBFs, with Luis, which is the coldbox file system. So you can abstract any file system. So if you change from s3 to local storage to you know, like whatever file storage platform you want, your code doesn't have to change, you just tell it, hey, I'm talking to s3 now instead of my local drive. So in the event, you can save files to your local. And when you push to production, a little environment sitting says okay, here's my s3 bucket, and the code doesn't change, it just uploads them to s3, and it acts like a local file system. So that's a great release we've just had
Michaela Light 31:14
is a great time saver. I mean, we've worked with a number of clients who have local storage, and they move out to the cloud AWS or as your or whatever. And then of course, they've got all these local files, and they need to be stuck up there. And then you're changing all the code to where the files aren't, I'm hoping that you guys could come up with a Todoist box kind of thing that would do time travel and edit code in the past to add in this library. So we just had to change it in one place to have files go wherever you want them,
Gavin Pickin 31:47
well, funnily enough, if you, if you have traditional ColdFusion file function names, it'd be easy to find them. And then you know, that way, it'd be easier for you to update, that's actually a good idea for a little command boss command where you could basically pull up all those locations and then change them. I know, they tried to stick as best they could to the the existing ColdFusion function, like names and, and stuff. So that way, hopefully changing won't be so hard. But uh, like I said, that session will be great. And grant is also talking about CB wire. So live wire is big in the Laravel community. And so we built CB wire. So it's basically like pole fusion code that's running, you know, interactive front end. That's really cool. So we'll be speaking about that. And then we have
Michaela Light 32:36
what what is this wire thing do for you, for those who aren't loud louder rail fans and have no idea what you're talking about.
Gavin Pickin 32:44
So it's kind of it's basically your code is set up with coldbox. And so you've got handlers and views, but in your views, they get dynamically changed. So you're some almost like a single page app on the front end. And as you click around, it dynamically pulls in the content from your next view into that location. So it's very, very cool. Like it's got a lot of hot reloading type stuff built in. It's really slick. And so grant has done a great job. He's really laid the lead with that. And he spoke about it last year. And he's done a lot of changes to it this year. And yeah, so if you want to know, look that up, I think is one of the ones that are available on CF casts for free for this year. We've done a few last year's best topics as like a, you know, to get you excited about 2022. And so that's one of them, I believe, and but yeah, if you look at live wire with Laravel, it's very much the same. So it's kind of like, I've got a ColdFusion view, but I want to use like some Vue js type stuff in there. And so you basically use these live wire, or CB wire annotations to your to your divs and stuff. And it basically makes it more like a little JavaScript view piece. But we don't have to go write Holbox API's or you know, API's to feed your data. You just do a handler view and it'll just change things out for you. It's really slick. So I definitely recommend that one. And then we got some other talks from
Michaela Light 34:12
how many of these CB things do you have? Because we've used CB Elasticsearch, for example, in one of the apps we wrote, which was a really cool way of doing fast text search stuff. You've just mentioned CB wire. And I guess CB stands for coldbox
Gavin Pickin 34:29
usually, but that's the funny thing. Because you see, TV could also be command box or content box. So that's where it gets confusing, but usually Yes, you'd be in front of a module means it's, you know, it's a little box.
Michaela Light 34:42
How many of these CB libraries or add ons or tools are there? A lot
Gavin Pickin 34:48
and so the next session I was gonna tell you about Dan cod. Oh, unpacking the box. Why so many boxes and what the hell do they do? Okay, he's been on the team for over a year. Hear. And so he's just like, he keeps funny about these new boxes. He's like, Man, I know we had a box for that, you know. And so that session is gonna be great, because the funny thing is he's actually built a map. So he's got this big old diagram. And it's like, here's the little pieces, and then that expands. And so it's really cool. He's gonna zoom in and like, show you and then sort of zoom out. As I've seen it, it looks really cool. And so Dan card's gonna be talking about that. He's done a couple of webinars recently about, you know, migrating from legacy or traditional code to more code boxy code. And he's done a workshop on it, but this one here, I mean, I think this will answer your question this a lot. And but the thing is, you're like, why don't we need them on site, you might not need all of them, but they all have their place. And they all have their, you know, pros and cons. And but
Michaela Light 35:45
yeah, I mean, this is this is probably like, Pendency. It's in there. Some of them you do need coldbox RAM, but a lot of them are standalone, like you said earlier. So yeah, for sure. I mean, they play well with coldbox if you use that framework, but if you don't, if you're not in a call box, I understand not everyone is, and we don't use it on every app. You know, it's
Gavin Pickin 36:06
yeah, there's there's definitely plenty and then like just in this little list here, we've got CBFs, which we just announced this CB filesystem. Eric Peterson's going to be talking about CB Q. So it's jobs and tasks in the background. That's a queueing thing. So similar to like remedying you. So you can choose if you want to use a local database or a rabid MQ or you can choose your cue to back it. So that CB Q That's the new one. CB playwright is also new. So that's into N tests where playwright and test box Eric is also talking about that one, you know, so just in this little list here, we've got you know, 3450 John Clawson gonna be talking about a new one called CB commerce. It's a flexible modular ecommerce solution. So yeah, this conference, we're announcing four new CB modules. So there's plenty. I 560. I swear, there's tons.
Michaela Light 36:57
Yeah, I've put a list of all the pre workshop topics and the community speaker sessions, the all these sessions into the shownotes. And, you know, anyone listening, just look through that and see what are the things that interest you? And what's what, uh, technologies or box tools you'd like, I've never even heard of that. Because I find a lot of thing with conferences or books, like Louise's books, it's, you know, even knowing something exists is half the battle. Once you know something exists, you can research it, you can try it out, you can see if it's good solution, but if you don't even know that solution exists, you're now kind of driving that car with the square wheels, again, wondering why the passengers in the back I your customers? Not so how so?
Gavin Pickin 37:47
Well, there's another thing we should probably tell them about to Yes, yep. And so along with those two days, we've got two tracks. So we have 28 sessions, that sorry, 24 sessions, because we have a couple of shorter, so you guys can get that to your flights. If you're leaving that day, we got the two keynotes, which always run for an hour, hour and a half, because we can't fit all the news in there, then we had a ton of speakers that we weren't gonna be able to fit. And some, some can't travel for COVID reasons. And you know, our unavailable because COVID kind of opened up, they didn't have the travel budgets and the time available. You know, so we had to figure out what we're going to do, we're going to have some of the speakers remote during the conference or not. And so we decided, if it's to maximize content, and make sure that when we're at the conference, all the speakers are in front of you, the best option was we're basically going to have a third track for the conference. So in addition to those 24 sessions, we're actually doing a third track, but we're doing it the week before, so the week before the conference, which is September 6 for the workshop, seventh and eighth. For the actual conference, the week before Monday, August 29. through Friday, September the second, we're going to have two sessions a day. So five days can sessions. And those are all going to be live for all the ins until the box attendees to watch. And then we're going to allow them to be downloaded. So if you guys can't see the session, because you're doing all your last minute work before you leave, you can actually download the video, put it on your laptop, and you can watch it on the plane while you're stuck in an airport between you know, flights or whatever. So you'll have 10 sessions you can actually watch. And we have some great speakers there.
Michaela Light 39:33
So there's a regular just so that quickly. Those are regular like one hour sessions. Yeah. But they're running in the week week prior to the event and they're going to be are you streaming them online or streaming
Gavin Pickin 39:47
them live online for all those under the box attendees. So if you're an attendee, you can tune in live and get it but we're recording them. And so this is gonna give you some, some access to some of those. Great, great cool fusion community speakers that you can't usually get access to. So Matthew Clemente is not able to make the conference this year, but he's going to be speaking about cold brews. Getting started with Java and your CFML apps, we got Kai Carnac, who can't travel from New Zealand because of COVID conditions right now, but he's going to be giving you modern ways to keep on top of crashes and errors and your applications. Brian Rinaldi, who is used to be an older CFML developer, he moved away and now he's actually working for LaunchDarkly. So he's gonna be doing feature flagging is just simple bullions false. So he's only speaking about feature flags for LaunchDarkly, we got Charlie arehart is going to be comparing and contrasting Docker images from Odyssey, Adobe, and Lucy. And then we've got Mark Takata, talking about advanced manipulations of PDF documents using Adobe ColdFusion ddx. And then re Canada's gonna be doing another basically Adobe PDF session, where it's going to be talking about extending PDF capabilities with Adobe Document Services. And we have three more sessions that we're still waiting for the speakers to confirm a lot of travel a lot of previous commitments. And so these one hour sessions will be available to download for those into the box attendees, they can watch on the plane or you know, whatever, we thought that'd be kind of cool. Again, we want to get you hyped up and ready for into the box. And this way, we're going to actually have about 34 sessions, plus some keynotes. And then we have a whole one day workshop, we got five different workshops to pick the day before the conference. So this is basically like three days of conference, but it spread out. So lots of content, you know, lots of great speakers. And so when you add all those communities speakers, and it's like half of the talks are going to be from community speakers, which is what we love, you know, we love people talking about hope, using the light, some of the stuff is nothing to do with audits, you know, we're talking about using Java and ColdFusion apps, you know, and then Michael born from odus, he's not able to make it to the conference, but he's going to speak about melee search, which is a search platform for the rest of us. And you thought CB Elastic Search was pretty cool. Melee search is really cool. Like, all the different things that CB Elastic Search should have, or Elastic Search CPLs search just talks to it. But you know, merely search, it comes with all those smart search options you normally want. And out of the box, it's pretty slick. And so he's gonna be speaking about that. And then like I said, three more sessions to be announced. We're hoping to get some, some other big names. You know,
Michaela Light 42:25
I feel like we're in one of those late night TV mercial thing. Wait, there's more. This offer includes these things and these extra things. Now Operators are standing by to take your order now. Yeah. So just talk about the pre conference fold. These are the pre conference workshops, a full day training sessions. Is that true?
Gavin Pickin 42:49
Yeah. So we have five workshops, which are going to be a full day workshop. And so those are the day before. So the September 6 is Tuesday, Monday is Labor Day. So it's a good time for everyone to travel, they can travel on that day or before. And then basically, the Tuesday is going to be workshops. And so you've got five great workshops to choose from. And they are filling up, there's limited seating, but we always make them about, you know, 10 to 15 people so that way, you've got couple, two to three audits people there to help you in the very hands on, you know, you're not gonna just
Michaela Light 43:25
you have the teacher of the class, then you've got teacher training assistants or teacher assistants who go around the class, you bring your laptop, you have all the software installed on your laptop ahead of time. Yep. And then you work through whatever the topic is. And we've got some asynchronous programming containerization, legacy code conversion, test box, Vue js, and mobile apps, and rest API's. And so the idea here is not only do you learn how to do it, but it's hands on, you got examples, you play with it, if you get stuck, someone will come around and help you get unstuck.
Gavin Pickin 44:03
Yep. And yeah, we've had a great success with these workshops in the past. A lot of these are actually new workshops, because over the last few years, we've had even two days of workshops in previous years you've had, you could do one full day workshop and the next day to another four day workshop before the conference. And so we do have Labor Day weekend and everything. We just did one day workshop. And so yeah, you can pick Luis and Eric Peterson are going to be leading the asynchronous programming and scheduling one John Clawson with or Captain container is going to be working with Grant Copley with containerizing and scaling your applications. Dan Cod and the Ellen Quinlan are going to be helping you convert legacy code to the modern world. And then Brad wood and Javier Quintero are going to be talking about tick box. So getting started with BDD TDD testing. And then myself and Daniel Garcia are going to be doing Vue js bar and mobile app powered by REST API so that we're actually gonna Build a little View app and export it. So you can play with it on Windows or on an Android tablet. You know, it's pretty neat. And so, there's a lot of great workshops here. And yeah, it's, it's, like I said, it's really hands on. Yeah, you should have your laptop with you, we'll send you information before the class to make sure you have all the big stuff downloaded. So we're not sitting there for an hour trying to download all. Everybody download everything at the same time on you know, conference Wi Fi. So we'll have you ready to go. And then yeah, we basically we walk through talk through, show you something and then you get time to do it. And then we'll have, you know, at least two people, but in the bigger classes, we'll probably have a third or fourth attendee sorry, ta helping as well. But, you know, these are all just people that know what they're doing and leading you through it. And yeah, they're, they're great sessions they're new to so if you've been through a previous workshop, these are different, these are new. And I think you're, you know, there's a lot there and a couple of them are getting pretty close to full. So that's where we might have to make sure we put them in the bigger room and get an extra TA to help. But yeah, there's still spots available right now for all of them. And, again, we'll we'll try and fit everybody in. But, you know, there are limited seats. So sign up and get your get your ticket for that.
Michaela Light 46:19
So what an amazing line up of topics and speakers, Gavin, I'm almost going into excitement. ColdFusion overload, I may need to add an extra few CPUs to my brain to deal with how much confusion goodness there is here. Yeah. Why don't we talk about how people can register for the event? And what all these different things cost?
Gavin Pickin 46:42
Yeah, well, obviously into the boss.org is where you can find out all the information. We're updating it daily. And so we've been adding all the pre conference stuff there, the new stations will be there as well. We got all the speakers up there. So I think there's a few I haven't even mentioned like Daniel Garcia and George Murphy and Esmeralda Acevedo, you know, we got so many speakers, it's crazy, keep them up. But if you get into the box at all, you can see all that. And then the ticket pricing. So regular ticket prices. Now we did have early bird specials, but there's gone, but the conference itself is 595. And then if you want to do the conference and the workshop before it's 995. And I think we've got a special deal for for the tear tech podcast listeners, don't we?
Michaela Light 47:26
We do, you can save 20% of that price. So that's more than a Benjamin in your pocket for using that code. The code is Tara I TB for into the box 20. So that's I see if I pronounced this word and I'll put it in the show notes. It's Tara, it'd be 20 gone, what a word. And there's a direct link in the show notes or get you to the checkout page with the discount code filled in. So that saves you both on the conference. And just to be clear, the conference gets you two days of workshops and a whole week of those pre conference online sessions. Plus the corridor track where you can snag Brad wood or Gavin or Luis or anyone else you can get ahold of who's there to answer your tech questions, which is probably worth the price of admission, alone. And then if you decide to go to one of those one day, full day, in person hands on workshops, the discount code applies to those as well. So and they're filling up fast. So yeah, that's how you can register? And do you have some kind of? What if someone gets sick or whatever, at the last minute, is there a transfer ticket policy? Or what how do you guys deal with that?
Gavin Pickin 48:50
We'll make We'll make it work, just you know, let us know. And we'll try and work with you there and see if we can transfer it or do something and I know that people in the past have, you know, had a workshop and they weren't able to attend or whatnot. And then you know, the next time we did when CF summit was we have a workshop there as well. You know, we've we've, we've made it work so we could you know, get them over to that one. So just let us know. I mean, we'll always try and work with everybody so
Michaela Light 49:16
well, that's great to hear because we're living in a somewhat chaotic world this year it seems been through so many narrative shifts from COVID to wars in Europe to monkeys having spots to goodness knows what else and I do know that there are you know some places in the world where people you know, last minute they find out they can't travel for whatever reason. So really appreciate you having that flexibility there and what that means is there's absolutely if you if you're excited about into the boxes I and Gavin are I know Gavin's got his New Zealand I'm not really excited expression but there you go. Yes. I'm no but if you're excited about this, there's no reason not to register for into the box, you really, I can guarantee everyone listening, you're gonna learn a lot of ColdFusion goodness, you're gonna learn a lot of technology and ecosystem, stuff you didn't even know exists existed. And you will get your car running on supercharged round wheels for a comfortable ride for all your users of your ColdFusion applications. So that's been our experience at TurboTax.
Gavin Pickin 50:29
And the cool thing is, you get all the sessions after the fact on CF car. So even if you don't have a paid CF cast membership will give you an access to this year's 2022 videos as part of the, you know, part of your attendance fee. So basically, if you buy that, then you get by the ticket, you can watch, hopefully half the sessions in one track, if you're sitting in the same room the whole time, you don't have to make that hard decision on which 1am I going to see because you get to see the other one later, we're going to record all the sessions and make them available and see if cost as well. So not only do you get all of this stuff from the track that you're sitting in, but you also get the other one as well. There'll be recorded later. So you can watch them later. And that's great when you want to go and actually walk through them one by one and you know, follow the steps
Michaela Light 51:11
even for the ones I have have attended in person, it's nice to have a recording to go back because sometimes I get so excited about some new, you know, information, I learned that I missed the next five minutes of whatever Luis or Brad or you are talking about. So it's nice to be able to, you know, replay it back or skip to the bit. That's really exciting. What about code samples? Do your speakers provide code samples for what they're doing? Or how
Gavin Pickin 51:40
does that work. And then we usually do that we attach them to the actual speaker session. So we'll put them on site. And you can actually go see the previous year's into the boxes on the end of the box site, there's a little button with a drop down for the previous years. And they have a lot of the great content from the the more recent years there. So you can see the previous session descriptions and stuff. But code samples and slides, we'll make those all available. And we try to add them into the CF TAS as well. So that way when you're watching on CF casts should add a link straight to them. And if they're not there, just let somebody know on the box team slack. And then we'll we'll try and get those links added and to see if casts that we you know, when you're watching the video, you can click to the GitHub repo or to download the zip of the files or click on the slides and be able to look at it right there. So yeah, we try and make all that available, we harass the speakers to make sure we get all that information. And then we try and make it available. So yeah, that will be there. And we'll have the end of the box app, a progressive web app available. So you guys will be able to do that on your phone to be able to look at your sessions and figure out when you want to go to add them to your schedule. So that'll be available right before the the conference as well. So we're trying to get everything there. So yeah, you guys can learn the most because we don't want you to spend all your time writing everything down. While you're there, we want you to enjoy the session, get the most out of it. And then you know, reference back to it later. You know, so we wanted to get the most out of it. And that's that's the goal is to, you know, introduce a bunch of different things and ideas and you know, get different perspectives from audits in the community. And yeah, again, have a good time, learn a lot and then be inspired and ready to go.
Michaela Light 53:21
Excellent. Well, I'm excited about into the box 20 22/9 edition of this conference. Let's shift gears slightly. And I want to I'm curious, Gavin, you have a lot of experience a lot of confusion. You're very active in the cold fusion community. What are you most excited about this year in CFML. Land?
Gavin Pickin 53:43
Well, obviously under the box is going to be a big event. But CF Summit is back as well. So see if someone's going to be in Vegas again this year. So Adobe has got that and they've got some really good discounts on everything. Because Vegas as prices have gone up like crazy. Trust me, we know because we're doing a workshop right off to CF Summit and the rooms that we normally get for these. They have like doubled in price. So Adobe is spending a lot of money to make this conference affordable for you guys still. So there's two days of great content from from them. And they have a one day workshop after it. We have a two day workshop right after that. And so if you guys want to attend that conference, you know, that's a great conference. Again, a lot of great speakers. And I think Adobe is going to be dropping some hints here really soon about the next version of ColdFusion. So heard Adobe cf 2023. They're doing a session later in the year a webinar at the end of December, about Adobe cf 2023. And so I think at CF Summit, they're going to probably start to talk a little bit about that. And I know they just released that VS code extension for CF builder.
Michaela Light 54:50
And so that's in beta. It's not not really yes in
Gavin Pickin 54:53
public beta is what I mean it's released as a public beta so you guys can try that out. And so I know that they're going to be releasing that soon. So it's just really great to see all these tools coming together and all these releases. So, you know, it's always great to see what Adobe is doing with, with Adobe ColdFusion. So the next version is coming out. So be another one had to push more cloud stuff, and we're living in the cloud these days. So it's great to see what they're doing. And I'm excited to, you know, see, find out more about that. So see if somebody is going to be, you know, a big event. So that's going to be at the start of October. So one month after the box, CF summit in Vegas again, today, two day conference. And then we have our training workshops. So we're doing basically a hero to mega hero training out to see if Summit. And so that one we're going to be doing, you know, because we've done the club of zero to hero and the API edition, this one we're gonna be doing, you know, all of that. See if migrations and API's and we're going to be doing Vue js code and showing you how to work with that and build apps and actually publish apps with it. So it's gonna be a great one. Meet Louisa teaching that one. So we're excited. And I just got an email last night that I'll be speaking at CF summit as well. I know a couple of the other oddest people have got emails as well. So yeah, it's gonna be a really good time. So other than into the box, I can't wait for CF Summit. And then again, finding out news about WCF 2023. And then the VS code stuff. So
Michaela Light 56:20
but it's a very exciting year for ColdFusion. And definitely make makes me think ColdFusion is way more than alive this year. I just want to add into the releases, I'm expecting the Lucy six beta, open beta to be out real soon now. I was chatting with Zach over the Lucy community team, and they are fixing some bugs in the latest version of 5.3 or whatever that
Gavin Pickin 56:47
version number three and is actually thrombopoietin. Yeah,
Michaela Light 56:51
yeah, something like that. So they wanted to they wanted to fix issues, which obviously you're gonna go into version six. Anyway, he wrote a blog post about this on the Lucy site. And then you know, they're hoping to get the beta for Lucy six out. I didn't put an exact timeframe on it. But I think it'll be out in the next month. And then probably the final one will come out, you know, this year as well. So new versions of COVID, Adobe ColdFusion new version, Lucy, we've got the builder tool, we've got unlimited number of box product updates coming out what I say Unlimited is probably about a dozen to 20 is my guess, coming out, so a lot of at least Yes, a lot. Of course cool stuff and confusion. Well, if folks want to find you online, Gavin, what are the best ways to do that? Well,
Gavin Pickin 57:43
I'm on Twitter at G PyCon. So G and then picking like you're picking something up off the ground, but the G's on the front, not at the end. And then I'm on LinkedIn as well. But I'm on the box team slack. I'm on the CFML slack as well. I've been doing lots of stuff on online. CFX meet up with Charlie. And then obviously I'm on the CFML news podcast every week. So if you go to CFML news dot moderniser die.io. You'll find out about that we we basically broadcast every Tuesday at 10am. Pacific time. But yeah, it's hard to miss me water solutions.com You'll see lots of blogs and everything else but lots going on. But yeah, I'm just hoping we can meet a lot more people added into the box here in Houston in just under a month. It's come up fast. So a month from today, the the workshops basically. And then this recording
Michaela Light 58:38
is incredibly easy to it's
Houston, Texas, and actually it's at a different hotel near to the airport, which means it's very easy to get to.
Gavin Pickin 58:54
Yeah, but it's a great new venue. We're really excited about this one it's you know, the next step up and being used and it looks amazing. So we can't wait to get there and again, have a great conference and then happy boxes out our trademark party that we have at the end of the first day so usually have a mariachi band some drinks and snacks and everything and just a little bit more time to hang out with all the speakers and everything. So we really love to do the heavy boxes, the only mariachi band party in the pole fusion community. You have to It's great
Michaela Light 59:28
fun. Yeah. Great. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast to talk about into the box Gammon.
Gavin Pickin 59:35
No problem. Thanks for having me and hopefully we'll see everybody Evers into the box or see if some of this year
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
