Topics I Upvoted For cf.Objective() 2014

I've voted for the cf.Objective() topics I'd most like to see this year. I purposefully waited to vote until the board was fully populated since I wanted to give full opportunity to the late comers. It was actually kind of hard to decide since I felt bad NOT voting for everything. I tried to stick to a couple topics from the category. I also did my best to ignore the current number of votes and the presenter just to stay unbiased.

And in case you're wondering, no I didn't vote for my own topics. I figure if it takes my vote to get chosen it probably wasn't that good of a choice :) Here's what I chose and why:

Regulators... Node Up! - Adrian Pomilio
& JavaScript the Stack - Adrian Pomilio

There's definitley a lot of Node action going on this year. It does seem to be cool and hip, so I figure it would be nice to learn some more about it. I wasn't sure which one of the 17 node talks to go with so I sort of arbitrarily chose these two since they didn't have as many votes (go underdog!) and I've never heard Adrian present before.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of DOM - Ryan Anklam

This one gets credit for a catchy name. What really caught my attention though is that Ryan works for Netflix on giant scale that needs to perform. Actual real-world experience of that scale has to be worth something.

Moving to Railo - Hints, Tips and Tricks - Gavin Pickin

I've done several moves to Railo and know there's always little things that get you here and there. I know several people (Gavin included) left cf.Objective() last year inspired to switch to Railo so I think this topic is fairly applicable for the audience.

The JVM is your friend - Kai Koenig

I love this talk. I actually came very close to submitting something like it myself a couple weeks back but didn't just because I don't have the time. Java stuff, especially garbage collection and memory spaces are black magic to a lot of CF developers and I think a topic like this is great to help boost people debugging chops. Kai also has quite possibly the coolest access I've ever heard.

Deploying to the Cloud - Mark Drew

I'm a little surprised I didn't see more "cloud" topics this year. I'd love to see more people presenting on stuff like CloudBees, Jelastic, Profitbricks, etc. As much as the word "cloud" is annoying in a sort of marketing-what-does-it-really-mean way, I think it's still pertinent and Mark has been an entertaining presenter the last times I saw him.

All your base are belong to us, what the bad guys see - Danny Dineen

I love security-- especially from the perspective of back hats since I think that gives you the best view of how they think and how you should harden against them. Server hardening is as applicable as ever, and Danny doesn't seem like one of the "usual suspects" so I'd like to hear him throw down on it.

BReaking RAilo - Mark Drew

Again, security-- I can't get enough. Many topics focus on Adobe CF but the more Railo is adopted, the more attention hackers are going to pay to it and I have no illusions of "magic" security just since Railo is Open Source. That said, I'm excited to see a Railo-centric talk on server hardening.

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) - Change the way you code - Luis Majano

BDD is pretty cool, and honestly I hadn't really even heard much about it until Luis starting working on TestBox. I think this talk will be good for the community to help push the limits of the testing we're doing.

Why ColdFusion Koans is a great tool - Applying Test Driven Learning - Gavin Pickin

Gavin gave a version of this talk for ColdBox Developers Week and it was fantastic. I love Koans as an intuitive way of learning a technology AND unit testing at the same time. Gavin also has that cool Kiwi accent.

Functional Programming for the Web - Sean Corfield

MOST things that come out of Sean's mouth are worth listening to, even if you don't agree. I think this talk sounds very interesting. I understand the fundamental differences in functional languages, but look forward to some good examples to really help understand them.

Breaking-Stuff-As-A-Service: Stress Testing Your ColdFusion API - Matthew Reinbold

Here's another topic I didn't realize was missing until I saw it. There's a million different types of testing, and load/stress testing seems to get overlooked until the sites come down under load. Looking forward to this.

AOP (Aliens Over Prussia) - Discover this magical land! - Luis Majano

I know there's people out there who aren't using dependency injection. Heck, there's people not even using objects. This topic has a lot of prerequisites, but I think Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is crazy powerful and people should learn about it. Once you're able to wrap your brain around the concept of decoupled concerns, it opens up a lot of possibilities.

Decouple and Scale with Enterprise Messaging - Luis Majano

Message queues are on my list of interesting technologies that other platforms seem to use like crazy but haven't really caught on in the CF world. I think this will be a nice session for people building large apps that need to integrate and scale.

Getting started with responsive Web Design - Matt Busche

Agagin, this is a topic that I find personally interesting. I also don't know much about it so I'd like to see it make the cut.

Say goodbye to "it works on my machine" with Chef and Vagrant - Curt Gratz

I've been wanting to dig into tools like Chef and Vagrant for a while, so this topic seems perfect. I think it fits in nicely with the cloud kind of stuff.

The Care and Feeding of Designers - Sharon DiOrio and Heather Bowman

This one made me laugh. A lot of people in small shops don't work with a designer. For those of us that have, we know some of the pitfalls and friction that can exist in the workflows between the design and development team. I'm personally excited to see some insight on this.
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There you have it. My votes do not represent actual endorsements, guarantees and may contain nuts. Please vote as your moral compass guides you, but for goodness sakes, vote for something!