Scotch on the Rocks is done and done! I’m back home and relaxing the glow of 2 (and a bit) days spent learning stupid amounts of cool stuff, meeting even cooler people and doing it all in one of the coolest conferences I’ve ever had the good fortune to attend.

I’ll get onto the sessions in due course (feel free to head straight to the day one session post if you want to get straight to the good stuff – I won’t mind in the slightest) but before I do I should really justify my gushing opening gambit. I’ve done a few conferences in my time, bigs ones run by Microsoft, little ones run by local user groups and intensive “airlift” seminars for the likes of SourceFire and others – all of them enjoyable and all of them dating to at least 2 BC (Before ColdFusion – obviously!).

I’ve spent the past year immersing myself in a completely new (to me) and rather different (on the face of it) world of application development and, to be honest, I’ve developed something of a crush on ColdFusion. So my first CF event was always going to be a big deal. Certainly when one considers the speaker list included the cream of the Adobe CF team as well as a host of the best known names in CF I shouldn’t be surprised that I found the event as fulfilling as I did. But what really made SOTR stand head and shoulders above other events was the massive sense of community.

I’ve said it before and I stand by it – the CF community is one of the best in the IT world. Populated by intelligent, dedicated and personable guys and girls there is always someone ready to assist you with problems or bounce ideas off. Based on this foundation, the sense of a shared passion underpinned the whole of SOTR2010. There was little of the “corporate line” that often accompanies platform specific events and it was great to see the Railo team rubbing shoulders with the Adobe guys; competitive and each fighting for their own tech, but united by a genuine love for the culture of CFML – powerful web development made about as easy as is possible without getting someone else to do it for you!

I think that’s enough gushing from me (for now) as there’s a lot to cover but I’ll finish this introduction saying that, whilst the tech is always impressive and the sessions were brilliantly varied and all informative – it was the people that made the last 2 (and a bit) days so enjoyable that it is difficult to class it as work and make me proud to stand up and say my name is Rob Dudley … and I’m a ColdFusion developer.