Cloudforce New York was hot, with thousands of people soaking it up. Here's what I saw and learned after working in the Developer Zone and Code Consultancy area for several hours:

• Throat lozenges are a requirement.  Several hours of talking really takes its toll!
• The Force.com Workbooks and Cheatsheets are always a big hit – and folk actually use them.  I encountered many folk heads-down, creating an object or two, checking out the auto-generated CRUD screens, and browsing the rest of 'em.  Some were just reading through it, willing to follow through at home.
• A few new devs wanted books.  You know, those paper things.  I pointed those folk to our new book page (which I really should blog about).
• The word "org" is confusing.  Nobody knows what it is.  "Environment" rocks.
• Some folk ask hard questions – good hard questions.  Two users I spoke to wanted to lock down a web service call.  In the end it looked we'd do the following on Force.com a) use network access security to only allow a certain IP range, b) use two-way SSL certificates, c) encrypt the actual data.  That's tight!
• Lots of folk were interested in integration – and of course all those recent toolkits and the REST API make it quite manageable and open.
• Our platform is bigger –  folk were wanting to learn about Heroku and Ruby on Rails as well.
• You can use the Visualforce apex:actionSupport to easily add  some great dynamic input facilities to Visualforce!
• There are lots of devs here in New York.  The breakout sessions were packed.  Database.com & Android/iOS, Heroku, VMforce – lots of interest.  I was really pleased by the huge attendance of the Force.com Workshops.  Steve did a great job of walking through the workbook, together with a packed audience following along.  In the end it was standing room only – if only all those standing had iPads they could have continued to build their apps in the cloud!

Overall – an awesome event. I got to meet loads of eager new developers, as well as excited veterans. 

Check out some of the pics from the event below, and read Reid's take too.

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