I returned yesterday from my trip abroad to Scotland. Andy Allan was kind enough to invite me to come speak at the conference. I feel very fortunate for the opportunity and believe that the conference was well worth the trip.
For those who dont know, Scotch on the Rocks is held in Edinburgh Scotland around this time each year. I cant speak for the previous conferences, but I can say that this years installation blew my socks off.
Firstly, the venue was amazing. The conference was held in the George Hotel in central Edinburgh. The hotel was in the center of everything. You could easily (and I did) walk to Edinburgh Castle, the Royal Mile, the Hollyrood Palace, various parks and monuments, pubs and more. The hotel accommodations were quite nice too!
Then there was the material of the conference. I must say that the conference is very well placed in terms of material presented. There were fairly entry level presentations, such as my two hour marathon presentation on CFCs, and obscenely advanced presentations such as Joes presentation on using Spring and Hibernate with CFML (which was all done on top of an entirely open source development stack), and more in between. I didnt see a single presentation I didnt think was fantastic.
To really make things interesting, we had Ralios announcement about joining JBoss and Adobes reaction to that. This is certainly something interesting to keep our eyes on over the next year. I do need to say that I think Gert handled this beautifully and I think that Adobes positive attitude thus far was terrific.
So, I highly recommend this conference. Even to those who might otherwise go to a conference in the states. Seriously. You may want to reevaluate where youre spending your conference dollars and give Scotch on the Rocks a serious look.
Lastly, for those who attended my sessions, you can download the complete materials for the CFC Crash Course and my Advanced Model-Glue talk.
DougHughes.net 