Allaire Developer Conference - October ‘99 Jeff Austin Westat, Inc. Matt Schuster Office of Thrift Supervision U.S. Dept. of the Treasury

Allaire Developer Conference  October 24th to October 26th in Boston MA  1200 people attended  50 Conference lectures and workshops

Pluses  Great topics  Good keynote by J.J. and Jeremy Allaire  Good preview of CF Studio 4.5  Some excellent presenters  Workshops had fast PCs with 17 inch monitors  Good chance to meet other developers and vendors  Virtual reality night at Jillians (like Dave and Busters)  Great Irish pubs and beer  Got to meet Ben Forta, Michael Dinowitz

Minuses  Way too many people for that size conference and facility  Workshops had 2 people per PC  Workshops, lectures, and lunches were very crowded  Workshops and lectures weren’t long enough. Only 1/2 to 3/4 of the material was covered at many sessions. Felt very rushed.  Some topics such as Advanced Security and SQL optimization could/should have been half or full day sessions.  Some presenters were unprepared or poor speakers.

Minuses (cont’d)  Not enough days for the number of sessions, should have been a three day conference.  Sessions and workshops weren’t repeated enough, hard to schedule.  Hotel was not a smoke free environment. Smoking in common areas. (Double minus for this one).  Food was so-so for lunches.  Not enough time between presentations (5 minutes)  Couldn’t check (maybe a plus, maybe a minus)

Jeff’s Rating of the Conference  D for day 1 due to good/fair sessions in the morning and a horrible workshop and session in the afternoon  A for day 2 due to excellent set of sessions  C overall due to crowds and smoking

Matt’s Rating of the Conference  C for Monday. Got bumped from a class I had preregistered for, but I got 4 T-shirts  B for Tuesday. Met some of Team Allaire and got 3 more T-shirts  C overall. Poor planning for Alliare/developer interaction, seemed clickish at times with Team Allaire getting special treatment (and not us)

Summary  OK first conference  Need to fix crowding, smoking, and time allocations at next year’s conference  Better prepared instructors and better connectivity for users needed.