Jared Rypka-Hauer, Lead ColdFusion Developer, Minneapolis, MN
Check it out here... but since it's brief, I figured I'd just include the excerpt right here, for your reading convenience:
The Conference
For some reason, a long long time ago, I had agreed to give the keynote speech for CFUNITED, a conference about ColdFusion.
"I never used ColdFusion!" I protested.
"Don't worry. Nobody has. The biggest sponsor of this conference is Microsoft, who have a huge presence trying to get the ColdFusion developers to switch to VB.NET," the organizers told me.
As luck would have it, the conference timing was perfect for the first feature-complete version of the interns' code. It gave the team a deadline to work to. At the conference itself, we set up a Fog Creek booth and the interns gave demos to several hundred attendees who wandered by.
This was the first trade show Fog Creek had ever attended. The truth is, a trade show is not a very cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Given the cost of travel, hotels, the booth, a thousand bucks for nice brochures, and everybody taking a week off of work, it's a really expensive way to get in front of prospects, especially since I can write an article on my website and get in front of 1000 times as many people.
/The ConferenceOK, so it's not terribly glowing... at least the name ColdFusion landed in front of Spolsky's readers and now they know that we have conferences.
We work hard, we play hard... and we have fun.
Laterz!
I saw this a few weeks ago, but decided not to post about it. I seriously doubt Michael Smith and crew, "the organizers" said anything of the sort.