For folks that attended, I'm gathering feedback on what people loved, what didn't work as well, etc. So far here is the feedback I have already: • No Adobe booth = bad. We will have a staffed booth with demos and swag next year. • Videographer was in the way of attendees in the back. We will position him in a better spot next year. • Confusion regarding our 2 special tables (ask an expert/network zone). We will picking tables ahead of time, letting people know who is on schedule at the ask an expert table, and having them set up prior to meals starting. • Cert program had difficulties w/ people getting set up. We have plans to use a new system I've built to overcome all the difficulties. More details in April at the CF Summit East event. • Mixed feedback on the day 2 speaker. People loved interacting w/ him in person but his talk was just "ok". We will try to incorporate more of the "party time" stuff next year but improve the on-stage experience. • Party was pretty fun, but not much to do other than just mingle & drink. I'd like to step it up with optional fun things for people to do. Details coming. • Some confusion as to location info for cert. Unfortunately this was a last minute change hoisted on us by the hotel. We may be changing venues (still in Vegas, sorry) which will hopefully give us more space, more control over signage and other improvements. I'd love to hear more from folks who attended. Were there any things that really sang to you? Things you loved? Annoyances? What should we make sure to have again next year?

I vote for more "Mark Headroom"

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One of the things that I found interesting on the first keynote slide about the stats of who was attending was the fairly high ratio of "Business/Product manager" types of attendees. (I believe the percentage of attendees on the business admin side of things was in the mid 40's). I wonder if it might be helpful on the various session descriptions on https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/agenda/ To clearly notate which sessions are geared toward more of a technical/developer audience (detailed step by step code walk throughs and things like that) and which sessions might be more interesting to the management attendees.

Scott this is really great feedback. I think we were kind of caught by surprise at the higher ratio of bizdev/cio type folks that came in this year. They are usually there but in a smaller ratio. As we lean more into the reporting, dashboard, viz side of things, I think that ratio may grow even more. A more well defined track system makes sense. We also should be sure we identify more clearly the difficulty level of the sessions.

Maybe chop some of the session times down 15 minutes and add another session. Day 2 keynote probably didn't need to be an hour (other issues not withstanding). and/or start half an hour earlier, one thing that always bites us is that we like to fly back the second day instead of the expense of an additional night but that means missing the last session. which is usually Brad so that's fine, but still

I wonder if an early start day 2 might do the trick. though that means the mai tai morning commute from your room to the conference hall might be rough.

I will add my vote to not having an Adobe ColdFusion booth at your own conference was a big miss. Also, the layout of the vendor/sponsor room was, in a word, weird. There was no "flow" through the room and the layout made it feel very compact.

Having a booth would solve not being able to find Adobe folks. If you can't do that, at least tie a balloon to them so we can find them easily in a big room?

OK first of all Mark, I am absolutely dying over the balloon comment. ROFL. That's going in the suggestion box 100% lol. I like the lightning talk idea. We actually do these at a meetup I run, SacJS occasionally. Usually in December. You get 5 minutes to talk about... well, anything you like as long as it is somewhat tech related (and family friendly etc). In fact, the very first talk I ever got up and did was one of these. I did 5 minutes on building ebikes. It was a hit. So... this is a great idea. We could have a signup and have folks signup for a slot. They get 5 minutes and then gong'd off the stage lol, but they can tell us about their favorite CF library or cool tag trick or a neat JS tool they like, whatever. FUN. I like it.

Yeah, first time I peaked through the door to the vendor room, it looked like a room I wasn’t supposed to enter…. After I saw enough people walking in and out, I got brave and went in.

I totally agree with the comment about the vendor room and the layout. Just my thought but I wasn’t a big fan of the Day 1 Keynote. In years past it seemed the Day 1 Keynote was much more inspiring. The presentation from the Adobe gentleman was almost like what I’d expect in a management meeting at Adobe about sales figures. It just did not do anything for me. The sessions were good and informative. The Monday party was good, but since it was combined with the other Adobe conference it had a different vibe. All in all it was a good conference and I hope to be back next year.

Justin, good points all, and I've communicated the general dissatisfaction with the "financial" section of the keynote with leadership in my after-action report. You're not alone in how you feel about it, though I would say that there was an outsized contingent of CIOs and other business oriented leadership there that could have benefitted from the data as a resource to push the narrative of continuing to use CF. But we didn't give them great quality metrics, and we'll need to update and improve there. And its been said, but there is a reason those graphs look like that. To me, it is a solvable reason and I hope to try to find the best way forward to improve, but it is non-trivial, as the legal department of Adobe is... um. Well, like the legal department of any huge corporation. I'd love to hear more about the "vibe" of the party, because I actually felt that too but I'd love to hear your take on it. I kind of felt the party was very... I dunno. Like a normal party. Drinks. Little food on little dishes. The highlight for me was when I got to introduce Andy to some of his big fans. That really made the energy go high. People were so excited. And he was very engaging and patient with them. I feel like that part was a highlight, at least for the folks in that area. So I'd like to riff on that and expand it.

I didn't go (as UK based and it would cost too much), but just wanted to say that I think it's great that you did put on a CF conference at all, so well done to all involved!

Interesting about the large-ish CIO etc contingent. What sorts of content was there for them? I'm asking because we're a non-profit, with several large and longstanding CF apps, but facing ongoing resistance to CF -- CF doesn't even show up on the Stack Overflow survey, lack of buzz in the industry (don't shoot me, it's what some people think), devs are hard to find (and perceived as expensive, though it doesn't look like it from where I sit 😉 ), kind of the usual. I'm wondering if we missed an opportunity by not shepherding some management folks to the Summit. (Didn't send devs either, due to total cost with travel and accommodations, but frankly we didn't consider sending management). Attendees, did management from any of your companies go? What did they think of it? Do you think it affected their perception of CF?

I didn't mind the Adobe keynote but didn't expect much more. The biggest problem I always have with their keynotes is that, while they're obliged to use the opportunity to cheerlead their product, they often (but not always, as was pointed out to me) veer way too far into the 'EVERYTHING IS GREAT OKAY! NO FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS PLEASE' where the need to satisfy their marketing requirements and get an ROI on throwing the conference at all precludes a frank assessment of where the product (or even the community) can do better. Like you'd never get the idea from Adobe that CF faces resistance anywhere. Obviously this is a difficult needle to thread but the way they tried to do it (and the way I've seen them do it at previous conferences) is not always credible. Like it's a genuinely interesting and non-obvious question: where does Adobe think the reach for their product is strong or weak? Where are the growth areas? Who isn't using CF today but might be tomorrow and what, if anything, is being done (or could the community do) to engage those people? Nobody at a conference likes that wants to see CF become less relevant but Adobe's stance often seems so 'everything is awesome!'

I actually really liked the "financial" slides, and I didn't mind that there weren't actual numbers (I have worked for large companies with legal departments too, so I guessed that was why). Admittedly, I have found myself trending more and more to the business administration side of things than the developer side of things over the last 20 years. This is also a big part of why I made my earlier feedback regarding the business management tracks. That being said, (and along the same lines of thought as sknowlton above) I would actually like to know a little more about some of the numbers. I assume the "10% growth year over year" metric is a global sales metric. I would be interested some sort of breakdown of what areas/regions/countries are seeing the most growth. Is it North American sales driving most of that growth or is that growth happening in some other continent? That kind of thing.

@Dave Merrill the main sessions that might have appealed were the talk on Google capabilities, my AI talk, Nimit's security talk (for ISO people), George's talk on AWS Lightsail w/ CF and Mary Jo's site redesign talk. All of these had "strategic" and knowledge building components that didn't necessarily go all in deep into code. I think I should clarify that when I talk about "business people", those people are also very technical. They're just not necessarily "developers". They're BAs, but also power users and probably are better at Excel than I'll ever be lol.

☝🏻This basically describes me.... started as a developer, moved into project management, then into program management, and currently act as a "Virtual CTO" for a couple companies and run a small consulting firm where I interact with many product owners. I spend very little time in code these days, and lots of time in Jira and phone calls, bridging the gap between product owners and development teams.

Scott, that's exactly the target audience for the less "code'y" sessions. Oh I also forgot, Charvi's future roadmap talk was also focused on that audience as well (though she was getting feedback too)

@Mark Takata (Adobe) Thanks for chiming in. Not trying to give you a hard time, but I don't see much in your listing that would entice CIOs towards CF, except the Google stuff maybe. Those things might be useful to an organization that's already focused on CF, but they're not going to attract people or reel them in. Maybe that's not really a function of conferences like this, I just wondered, since clearly parts of this one weren't for devs per se.

Dave, always welcome your feedback. You're kind of right, but I can tell you, we had a group come to Summit this year specifically because they were interested in moving to CF. They brought along some people who were "on the fence", and those people apparently left fully convinced that CF was the way to go. But yes, we are not catering necessarily to "reel them in" or make people interested who aren't already. Those people wouldn't come in the first place.

Yeah the sales stuff for people not currently using CF is more of a keynote topic question, not a 'let's provide content for people who aren't yet our customers but for some reason bought tickets to CF Summit' question

All that said, that area is one where we need to majorly step up our game. We have nearly no visibility at any other conferences.

It would be nice if Adobe would promote CF at other conferences such as Adobe Max. That’s low hanging fruit because Adobe doesn’t have to pay to have CF represented there.

Oh Justin. Goodness I wish that was the case.

next year we share with learning summit again, but this time with jello wrestling tournament brackets

Dude, always while I'm drinking coffee. FFS

midjourney to the rescue!

@Mark Takata (Adobe) Regarding the pool party and vibe. I was just comparing this year to the last time there was a similar party at the Summit. There was more in terms of entertainment and it was just the CF summit attendees. So it made it easier to casually bump into and talk to other CF attendees. This time, there were so many folks that I felt I had to really search for CF folks. Maybe that was just me, though. On the flip side, the food and drinks were awesome.

Don't lie dude. Those are just the last 4 photos on your phone from yesterday.

true

Justin, thank you. That's good info. I agree, while the idea that it might have been fun to mingle with the other folks might have looked good on paper, in reality, exactly what you say is usually the point. Find your friends. Hang out. Meet community folks. Really good points. I'll add your feedback to my after-action report.

I think adobe should have a booth, and speak at sessions, to promote CF at the big generic tech conferences like https://websummit.com/

We will probably start with the bigger tech conferences in the US first, just from a "can I get budget for this" standpoint.

yeah... with 70k attendees, you can peruse the A list

Hey, at CF Summit, all 500 of you are on MY A-list ❤️

Sweet, I'm going to apply to bee a speaker at web summit and let them know that I'm on Mark Takata's A list.

Yes that will definitely get you in. In where? I have no idea. 😄

I'm sure that with your recommendation, and the price of a regular admission, I can go anywhere any other paid attendee can go.

Godspeed sir. Make me proud 🙂

If adobe is willing to pay my airfare and price of admission, I will walk around in CF t-shirts and tell as many people as possible how great CF is 🙂

Lemme get back to you on that one 😄

Does Adobe have a presence at developer week in the SF bay area? https://www.developerweek.com/... that seems like an easier sell than sending the team to lisbon

We did Dev Week in... 2019? Something like that. It went OK. Elishia did a talk there even. And you're right, it would be the easier lift. I think first we will send our lazy evangelist to some of these to do scouting and gap analysis on who is there that we'd get ROI from. Then choose the best spots and get a booth/talk together.

Yes, that evangelist guy needs to stop preaching to the choir and hit the pavement to talk to the people who don't know coldfusion 😉 (I'm sure that you do that... but do more)

I definitely sleep too much. Nobody needs 4 hours. Ridiculous. 😄

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I thought the party was fine. I randomly shared a table with a couple of guys and ended up having a great chat. The wait staff had to kick us out, otherwise we would have kept going. Food and drinks were spot on, I thought. The day two speaker? Ouch. That whole thing felt like a crash and burn. If you can't get Weird Al for next year, maybe a poll of potential speakers? I'm fine with them not being a tech person, but ouch. Overall I thought the conference was good and won't rehash what others have said, but I didn't get as much out of it as last year. This could just be the randomness of which talks were selected. I would love to hear a talk on Azure/SAML SSO integration, but I'm probably in the minority there. Regardless, thanks for everyone's hard work to make it happen.

I got kicked out of the monday night party 3 times... I just kept moving to another table closer to the exit and talking to other people.

You're a legend Scott. They got your poster up in the work room now for next year. 😄

Not sure if mentioned, but I believe I provided my company name when I registered for the summit, but it wasn't included on mt attendee badge. I didn't see company names on any other badges either. Was this intentional? (I checked and my badges from 2014 & 2016 contained my company name.)

The company names were not included for some reason this year. I think last year the companies were much bigger than the individual names and people complained they couldn't read them. So this year we... um, I guess just replaced the company name? I'm not sure. I'll have to check on that. But I didn't have to squint to see who anyone was! 😄

double-size nametags next year. I want an airport banner around my neck or my money back

@sknowlton I present to you, the world's worst photoshop of next year's name tags:

that's pretty much my mental picture of Nolan already

As well as my actual outfit for next year.

Can the clock size be based on number of times attended. So a new attendee would get a picket watch where Charlie and I get to walk around with Big Ben?

I'll see what I can do Dave lol

Regarding the "salesy" slides, I too enjoy seeing things like the increase in new customers. Although I am already pro-CF, it helps keep me going. And gives opportunities to share motivating stuff on social for others to see. The more others see posts about CF, the more chances they may include CF in their stack discussions.

Suggestion for the badge/outfit next year, instead of having a digital dress though, it would be a digital T-shirt. By default (or during the CF Summit), it would show our badges digitally. After the summit is over, we can configure the T-shirt to show text or patterns of our choices. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/adobe-unveils-interactive-digital-dress-in-los-angeles/

Love this. In unrelated news, CF Summit 2024 tickets will be $11,500 each. 😂

You could totally get sponsors to offset some of the costs - it's Vegas so who knows what Vegas companies would want to have people walking around as billboards.

We'll just give everyone forehead tattoos with their name and company and a lovely Cf on there too ❤️ 😄

As long as they are those temporary tattoos that you put on with water, I’m game

Everything is temporary Scott 😂

cfsummit-fist-tats.png

damn. I already got CFML LIFE on there.

I guess you will have to put cfsummit on your toes then

With CFSU on the same hand - there are so many options to hide fingers and change the message

It’s always good to have options

Another note from other software conferences - I have seen different awards like partner of the year for a developer who has helped a customer with something really amazing. Same for customer of the year. Maybe highlight someone using the new features you want to push. You could also have MVP awards to highlight those contributing to the community. They would also do a small gift to those MVPs = maybe a special shirt (polo instead of t-shirt) or nice pen. One year, they gave away a swag item from one of highlighted customers. I am sure the customer helped with the cost of the giveaway to also promote themself.