John Paul Ashenfelter - With over 15 years experience in web application development, John Paul provides broad ranging analysis and development skills focusing on the rapid development of web-based business applications. His particular technical expertise lies in Ruby, Rails, ColdFusion, and database design and development with a strong focus on open-source software.
John Paul is a frequent speaker at conferences and a contributor to online resources such as the O'Reilly Network and the (now defunct) WebReview site. He has written three books on web databases and ColdFusion and has contributed or been a technical editor on a number of other books on the web, databases, and development.
CFUnited session: ColdFusion with noSQL
1. Have you spoken at CFUnited in the past?
Every one except 2001.
2. Why should people attend your sessions?
A conference should expand your mind and challenge your assumptions. I'm talking about building CF applications that don't use a relational database. This is some *seriously* cool stuff.
3. Do you have any projects in the works that you will be revealing at CFUnited?
Probably -- the NoSQL community is growing quickly and there's a lot of work to do on the CF side to make it easier to integrate with these new tools.
4. Besides your topic, what other sessions are you looking forward to?
I really like FW/1 and look forward to seeing what open source projects are working their way into the ColdFusion world. I'm also always interested in seeing what folks are doing as far as testing and agile development.
5. What are some of the hot topics you'd like to see at RoundTable discussions?
Growing the open source community with ColdFusion. We've started to get pretty good about having projects run by a single person, but we're still not there as far as larger collaborative projects that involve many different people. This probably relates to 4CFF.
6. Where can people find you at CFUnited?
In the bar, coding.
7. What's the latest news with you? Has anything changed since last CFUnited?
I've started another company. Oh, and I'll be flying into the conference straight from two months of living in Mexico.
8. What is unique about CFUnited?
There's not a lot of places large numbers of CF folks gather -- CFUnited is unique in both the breadth of experience in attendees (n00b to guru). CFUnited also has some of the best-looking conference staff of any major conference I've ever attended.
9. What do you like to do in your free time?
Be outside, do thing with my boys. Travel.
