Following quickly on the heels of my first article about the 2010 Scotch on the Rocks, is my run down of the second day. I'll apologise now for this being quite so wordy, but I've tried to keep things succinct. I'd also like to say up front how much I enjoyed this years Scotch on the Rocks. It was a great venue, with great speakers, covering a very wide variety of topics.

It was a very intense two day thought explosion, where your left feeling kind of drained, but also with a ridiculous amount of 'development energy'.

The mobile revolution with Serge Jespers

I was particularly interested in this presentation as it was based around Adobe's plans involving mobile devices, and I'm a big fan of the Android platform. Serge covered the new Flash Builder 4 mobile features, and several different points to consider when building mobile Apps, like the screen orientation, and multi touch etc.

AJAX discussion with Ray Camden

Ray started off with a caveat to his presentation, he started off by saying that it wasn't going to be a long winded, example based presentation, but rather an open discussion about AJAX, and peoples experiences in using it. I have to say it was great, it was really interesting to hear people having the same dilemmas as you, and in some cases having entirely different issues, as they had approached things differently.

It was a real exploration of how and why we are using AJAX, and its frameworks, mainly JQuery.

SQL to HQL with John Wish

John Wish's first ever presentation was about Coldfusion 9's ORM functions. He delivered a full thought out, interesting, example driven presentation. I like the theory of ORM, despite not having any plans to upgrade to Coldfusion 9, but if the time comes, I'm definitely more well armed now than I was before. (And he used more of those stick men in his slides!)

The Cloud, Caching and Clustering with Mark Drew

I thought I'd dip my toe in the water here, as I am relatively unfamiliar with cloud computing. I know the concept, but Mark demonstrated it very clearly. Building in the concepts of Caching and server balancing with Clusters. A good presentation, but less applicable to me, so I didn't take much from it.

Productive work practices with Peter Bell

This was a totally non-tech based presentation, more looking at peoples working practices, and any recommended applications people could use to eliminate any wasted time. Peter focussed heavily on the 'Pomodoro' technique. This is basically where you work on a specific task for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break. Its an interesting working practice, and I definitely think its work a go.

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Applying the Twitter API model to Coldfusion with Ben Nadel

I was particularly interested in seeing this presentation for a few reasons. Firstly API's, as Ben mentioned here, are not massively well documented. They tend to be a bit of a black art. There is not a great deal of documentation dealing with how to construct and manage an API, or the expectations the community will have of one.

The first thing that struck me in Ben's presentation was that the REST API concept is very much about the functionality and not at all about the technology. If the API is written well the end user does not have any concept of the underlying technology base, or what's happening beneath the surface.

Conclusion

Overall I think events like this are a great opportunity to meet like minded individuals from your community. Just associating with people who have a similar filed of expertise, and experiences to share with you is worth it alone. Add on top of that the industry leading speakers, who are all genuinely enthusiastic about their subject matter and it is a real learning experience.

I have tweeted a few times around Scotch on the Rocks, and the phrase that keeps coming up is a 'thought explosion', and it really is. Personally I have been left in a state where I have dozens of new ideas, and a wealth of new initiatives to try out.

...And they announced Scotch on the Rocks 2011 at the end....