Coldfusion Conference Pricing

I've seen a few comments about the cost of CFUNITED and the earlybird closing date. In the past, it's not been something I've paid much attention to because I've always attended as a speaker and always gotten all my material in on time so TeraTech comps the fee and the hotel. If you don't get your act together as a speaker, they still comp the conference but you pay for your hotel! So let's take a look at the prices... The CFUNITED 2007. Same location, same hotel so we can assume the same price (it doesn't currently list the room rate). It's a four day conference, with the earlybird of $849 thru December 31st (odd that it closes before the F/W conf, even tho' CFUNITED is much later in th year). Alumni get $100 making it $749 if you book early. Again, assume we need a hotel each night so that's $776. A total of $1,525 or about $380 per day of training. Again, that's still not a bad price for training really. I won't be attending the Frameworks Conference - far too much to do here in Hosted Services to even contemplate a conference that early in the year! - and I have not had time to submit a topic for CFUNITED (again, too busy - I missed the call for speakers deadline). I'm on the conference advisory board for both conferences so I'm supporting them as much as I can. Last year was a tough one for me: three conferences (cf.Objective(), CFUNITED, MAX) and a lot of CFUGs (and I mean a lot!). It really does take a toll. That's why I didn't rush to get a topic submitted. I may yet be asked to speak as part of Adobe's sponsorship but I may just take a raincheck this year. So would I attend either conference, given that I'm not speaking at either? That's a tough call for me. Like most people, I have a limited training budget and have to be very selective of conferences that I attend (rather than speak at). I have to decide what value I will get out of a conference and weigh that against the impact of being out of the office during that time... A conference has to be pretty high profile for me to justify taking time out to attend. In the past, I've chosen Java One, Software Development West and the O'Reilly Enterprise Java conferences as ones worth attending. In particular, SD West is extremely valuable to me, even tho' it's not a ColdFusion conference (it's pretty hardcore C++, Java and Design Patterns). SD West 2007 is in mid-March and it's very local to me. It's probably the most leading edge software development conference of the year on the West Coast (there's an SD East as well each year). All told, SD West 2007 will probably be my one conference of the year that I'll choose to attend. However, I've also been invited to speak at Comments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Sean is currently Senior Computer Scientist and Team Lead in the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He has worked in the IT industry for nearly twenty-five years, first in database systems and compilers (serving eight years on the ANSI C++ Standards Committee), then in mobile telecoms, and finally in web development. Sean is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practices, and is a well-known and respected speaker on these subjects. Sean has championed and contributed to a number of ColdFusion frameworks, and is a frequent publisher on his blog,