Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2022 - Digital Conference - Las Vegas

See attached for my full notes from the conference. Here are a few of them (not all).

- The future of ColdFusion, from Adobe's eyes, is going to be about performance, scale, security, and productivity.

- Everything needs a metric

- Moving more and more things over to smaller microservices

- Making things multi-tenant (able to handle multiple corporations or businesses without displaying any of the other's data). We already do a ton of this... keep going and keep pushing it further. One of the key words that the presenter was using was "data isolation".

- SaaS models (software as a service) - low-friction and focusing on the service side of the approach

- Building relationships not just selling software

- Quick onboarding and time to value ratios

- Creating a layered model

- Building change into the model and into the plans - how quick can you move? Are you locking yourself into something?

- Beware of technical debt - older code - it has to be updated, maintained, and even removed at times (ok to get rid of things)

- See image (photo of a slide) for some take aways from Monolith to SaaS - Focus on SaaS building blocks first, make identity and isolation an early priority, support multiple tenants on day one, don't defer automated onboarding, instrument for metrics - even if you only start with a few, tenant-aware management and monitoring should not be an afterthought, exercise all the moving parts with each iteration, continually ask yourself if you are meeting your agility goals. Many of these are great ideas for our fracture project (upcoming adilas project).

- If you are using tokens - maybe think about JSON web tokens (JWT's).

- Educating the younger generation - creating a training pipeline - re-invent yourself/ourselves from an educational angle.

- Most good jokes have a setup and then punch line. The setup is the expectations and the punch line is the twist. If you set things up correctly, it allows you to pivot or twist if needed. Thought that was kinda fun.

- There are benefits of bad ideas... is it ok to bounce something off of the party based on that idea - sometimes you get more ideas building off of the bad ideas - they tend to be seeds for the next idea or thought.

- It's ok to throw things away - it's ok to go down the wrong path - being creative is not efficient.

- Sometimes you can flip things on its head (180 degree flip) - what would that look like?

- Having a great idea and then having an even better idea of not using the great idea. Treat it like a giant pyramid of ideas. The base has all of the ideas, as you go up, you need to get rid of things to get to the best ideas. If you don't throw anything away, you go from a pyramid (filtered) to a square tank with no priorities or set level of applicability.

- Who is the filter? What ideas pass the test? That makes a difference.

- Find a way to connect with people and bring joy - think of something like a comfort food - consistent - same thing every time - make it loveable

- Most software packages have a 10-year average lifespan - plan for that and plan for change to keep it going

- A full rewrite often ends up in a financial disaster. If you do decide to do a full rewrite, do it for a business model reason not for an emotional reason. Morph through evolution not full revolution (total change). See photos.

- Sometimes it is easier to write code than it is to read code - thus the tendency to want to rewrite things.

- Keep pushing out new things and use permissions and settings to show/hide and make the new features or tools conditional. Base everything off of the permissions and settings.

- Small changes to microservices. Little by little, make the new stuff.

- Use the same (older) database

- 1. Make a case for what you are doing or wanting to do. 2. Set a boundary for what you are going to do - be careful. 3. Next you need a plan or a strategy.

- Same habits, same mistakes! Alter the habits...

- Things are tending to lean towards machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Be aware of those major trends.

- The 7 mistakes that developers tend to make - See actual notes for more info - 1. Fear of failure, 2. Shiny object syndrome, 3. Overengineering, 4. Going viral (most things don't happen that way), 5. Building more features, 6. Building for yourself and other developers, and 7. Burning out. Tons more notes in the actual scans of my notes.

- It is common for us (as developers) to think that everyone wants a full features multi tool (swiss army knife) when in reality, our clients want a simple butter knife.

- We love to solve problems and we love to build and create things

- Don't be afraid of competition in the space that you are working in.

- Offloading and running things asynchronously. Does the action need to be done right this second? If not, queue it up, offload it, and run those processes asynchronously. If you are offloading, outside services don't need to know your app permissions, they just do tasks based on queues or data.

- The value of your team over time - that is huge

- Find patterns that work

- Capacity - keep watching the downstream services - keep things flowing

- Minimal on batches of data and more on just in time or real-time transactions - smaller bites with more accurate results.

- Orchestrating and chaining workflows - step functions - ideally with visual maps of the logic

Good conference. Both Bryan Dayton and I went to the conference. Bryan has his own notes, but these were some of mine. For all of my notes, see the media/content upload for my full notes. Overall, I'd say that we are going in a good direction. Always things to learn and improve on but making progress and going down the right road. Good stuff!