NCDevCon 2017
This past weekend I had the opportunity to present at NCDevCon in Raleigh, NC. The title of my session was send.Better() - Giving Email a REST.
Slides from the talk are here: slides.com/mjclemente/sendbetter-ncdevcon.
If you're going to Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2017 in Las Vegas this November, I'll be giving a more CFML-centric version of the session.
If you're interested in the CFML API wrappers for the transactional email providers discussed, here they are:
Mailgun
SendGrid
Postmark
Sparkpost
What follows are some personal reflections of the process of presenting at a conference for the first time.
When I proposed this topic, I felt particularly qualified to speak on it; after all, I had written or contributed to CFML API wrappers for all of the email services discussed. What I found, after late nights, early mornings, wading through documentation, and running lots of tests, was confirmation of the aphorism that we've all heard before:
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Which is simply to say, it was a lot of work and I know a lot more about email than I did at the start. A lot more; which I'm really happy about. I wouldn't have taken that deep a dive into email, DNS, and transactional services if I hadn't been giving this talk.
The process of preparing and giving the actual presentation was also a learning experience. From picking the presentation format (Keynote? Powerpoint? Reveal.js?), to standing in front of an audience juggling slides, demos, and speaker notes, some things need to be done in order to be understood and mastered. I'm thrilled that I did it, and I can't wait to do it again.
