OK, OK, I know. I normally don’t truck with such dramatics, but the two topics I want to talk about merit it.

I’m talking, of course, about the two topics I submitted this year to CFUnited 2010. I’m asking for the chance to earn your vote. If you want to skip my stump speech, simply

Go here and Vote

You click that link, you search for “Esher”, you click the checkbox beside it, and you fill out a little more info and submit the form. I cannot emphasize enough how much good you will be doing for this world of ours (if you don’t, the terrorists have won. Do you want that on your conscience? Didn’t think so). Vote for change you can believe in!

My Pitch

Session #1: Debugging like a Rock Star

Last year at CFUnited, I presented on “Automating like a Rock Star”, wherein I spoke on batch processing, keyboard launchers, ANT, and JMeter. I covered a wide range of subjects, all with an eye towards helping make your development life less monotonous and more enjoyable.

This year, I’d like to present with that same goal in mind: helping bring more joy to your day job. I know: there sometimes is nothing more joy-less than debugging. I don’t pretend to have magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on your apps to make all your nightmares vanish. But I do have a bunch of strategies that have served me well. We’ll cover the most basic CF debugging – how to read a stack trace / tagcontext, how to trace through an object graph, etc – and move on to tricks for what is potentially the hardest debugging: when your app manifests bugs in production that didn’t appear during development.

Rock Stars don’t fill arenas by growing long hair and putting on makeup and pursing their lips (except Poison, but they rocked, so…). Rather, they work hard, practice till their fingers  and noses bleed, and out-persist lesser musicians. This session aims to demonstrate how to out-persist your bugs.

Session #2: End-to-end Testing Roundtable

How many sessions have you been to at a conference where you sat in a chair, a dude like me walked up on stage, said who he is, and rattled on for 50 minutes?

The End-to-End testing roundtable is NOT that session.

This session will be “facilitated” by some of my best friends in the community. We have no idea whether this will work. It could be the most boring hour or two of your life. But man… it could be awesome! What we hope for is that we can harness the collective experience in the room to discuss wins, failures, challenges, ah-ha’s, and other manner of discoveries related to application testing. We’ll talk a little bit about the different kinds of testing (unit, integration, the blurry lines), and from there, it’s all about engaging the audience.

We have no slidedeck backup. We have no prepared demos. All we have is a hope that we can attract a room of people who want to teach and learn.

If this sounds interesting to you, we simply say, “Come”.

Sessions you can believe in

Look: if you have worked with people, or are one of those people, who struggle constantly with effective, productive debugging, then I’m asking  you to check the checkbox for Debugging like a Rock Star.

If you want to take part in – or at least give others this opportunity to participate in – a one-of-a-kind session on application testing, then please check the checkbox for the End to end testing roundtable.

Go here and Vote

Thank you. And God Bless America.