Technology

For reason's best known to some brain dead marketing monkey, I got given a USB device that only works correctly on Windows. Have you ever seen a ghost in the machine open the run box, type in a web address and launch a browser with out asking ? Neither had I, and fortunately Linux and MacOS users don't have that problem. But how to get your free credit from the AWS Summit 2011 ?
I found a way.

Keynote
Mike Jones, Adobe
Mike is an evangelists for games at Adobe. A shift of focus I think Adobe is still making. Mike shows there are a massive number of devices, and you can target these all with HTML5 but Flash has a unique opportunity to innovate on all of these platforms. Mike has a nice time line graph to back this up over the last 15 years.

Keynote
Mark Drew and Gert Franz of Railo
It's up to you to be proud of CFML, don't apologise for it ! Tweet it, blog it ! You cant convert .Net, PHP users, only tempt them.
But likewise, we should try other stuff and tell everyone the 10% you like about Scala or whatever. You might end up with them in ColdFusion (or Railo !). Incentivise your colleagues, especially the 9 to 5'ers.
Price and performance is not an issue any more for ColdFusion, been around for ages but updated every single year.
Gert also talked about some of the cool stuff in Railo.

Keynote (Adobe)
Terry Ryan
Terry started off by saying that 5 years ago, we built websites with 2 simple tiers. Now have a web application, and tablet, and mobile, and each in many versions.

The next article in my series on user experience design is now up on the corporate blog : What users really want

I'm writing a web page article now and again for work, and the first few are now up.

(links in the full article)

Mostly for my own reference.

Agile User Experience

After talking about how Agile is a state of mind, not a methodology, it was shown that the problem is making time to do a proper job of the user experience, in a rapid Agile world with shorten time scales compared to the discredited waterfall type model.
Because agile encourages teamwork and cross discipline working, this close working benefits everyone.