SPEAKER HIGHLIGHTS: DOUG BOUDE

Who should come to your session and why?

OOP in the CF world is here, it's here to stay, and in my strong personal opinion, any CF programmer who doesn't embrace it, and soon, will find themselves left behind career-wise. For any Coldfusion developer who came from a procedural background, however, Object Oriented Programming...conceptually and practically...can be a daunting career paradigm shift to undertake. Having myself come from a procedural mindset, I know exactly just how frustrating it can be to find, consume, digest, and assimilate these new ideas into one's existing knowledge base. In this session, I will share a concise yet thorough synopsis of some of the more common OO terms and concepts as I have come to understand and use them, in the hope of helping to connect the dots between your existing understandings and those of OOP.

Who is this session for, then? If you have the need for an OO primer, are fully engaged in making the switch to OOP, or have been doing OOP since before it even had a name, this session is for you. For the newbie, it offers a good general dissection of OOP, along with a decent translation of the ideas and terms you will encounter; for the active learner, it holds a Texas size portion of information that can be merged and compared with what you have already gleaned on your own; and for the seasoned vet, it offers the opportunity to get a solid feel for how your less OO-experienced peers "think" about OOP in a CF context, empowering you to be able to more effectively impart the knowledge you possess to "the rest of us".

 
Are there any projects you are working on of interest right now?

As THE IT department at my company, my project list is fairly long, dynamic, and diverse. Much of it consists of duct taping a legacy PHP system to help temporarily streamline the company's corporate workflow. However, I am working on two interesting, "from the ground up" projects that I'd like to share a little bit about.
 
Project one is a Model-Glue application that allows its users to efficiently upload insurance claims in the form of a spreadsheet directly to an industry-prominent third party vendor via their API. This app leverages a database schema that allows individual users to create mappings between their particular spreadsheet layouts and the vendor's XML schema via an intuitive GUI, then transforms the spreadsheet data into the target XML files utilizing XML Stylesheets and XML Schema documents (XSD). All in all, this has been a VERY interesting project that is teaching me a LOT about XSLT, XSDs, and XML transformations in general, not to mention honing my OOP architectural skills.

Additionally, I am in the process of using Fireworks to prototype an entire new system (project two) to replace the legacy PHP system. This new system will be built using the Coldbox 3.0 toolset/framework.

What does workflow mean to you?

Workflow to me is the rhyme, meter, and tempo of doing what I do from day to day, along with the individual applications that I use in the process. I am the artisan, and the processes, methodologies, and tools I utilize to transform raw ideas into functional works of art IS workflow. 

What size company do you work for, and do they practice workflow now? and how?

I work for a small family owned Insurance Adjuster firm based in Boerne, Texas, and have been with them for a little over one year now. All told, there are probably 10 employees including myself. Workflow in the IT Department (which consists only of me), has been non-existent prior to my coming on board. The workflow I have put in place for myself is very dynamic in order to adapt to the company's dynamic business needs, but core to it are the religious use of an off-site code repository (Assembla, a third party SVN provider), Eclipse as my IDE, WAMP as my local development server environment, the usage of CanvasWiki to centralize all of the critical "if Doug got hit by a bus" type information, and Amazon S3/Jungle Disk to back up critical server data off site. Beyond that, I use a lot of Notepad, Editpad Pro, Firebug, some Jing, and Fireworks. 

What message would you have to someone starting in the business right now, or wanting to become a hybrid? A designer or a developer, be specific.

I can't particularly speak to the subject of wanting to become a designer (since I can't relate at ALL to such an idea! Craigslist looks cool to me.), but to the aspiring developer I would have a few words....

Programming is nothing more than solving problems, and I do believe that most people are decent problem solvers. The only difference with application development is in the kinds of tools that you will use; otherwise, you are simply solving problems.

Believe that nothing...no idea, no concept, no fancy term... is too difficult for you to grasp. After all, look at all the other people who do it successfully! And the majority of them are not smarter than you, I guarantee it. Bang your head against a thing long enough, and it WILL go in! I've proven this time and time again to myself.

Lastly, always take pride in the code you will write, and be ever striving to improve your knowledge and technique. It is your craft, your creation, the expression of your creativity, and how well it functions AND is written is (like it or not) a reflection of your skill and ability; of you as a developer.