How I got started in ColdFusion
A bunch of people are posting their "How I got started in ColdFusion" stories today; as suggested by Steve Bryant. I'll play along. I touch on the subject in my about page, but not in much detail. So here it is in long form.
I started programming when I was about 14, I think -- some time around 1996. I did all of the typical stuff of the age: qbasic, visual basic, and so on. I mostly taught myself out of books, and asked my dad when I got stuck. I had lots of books with post it notes and dog-eared pages, but this is the oldest one I can still find online. So long story short -- I was a pretty nerdy kid.
When my parents weren't forcing me to do stuff with Boy Scouts (a tradition which I intend to continue), I was usually found clacking away at my keyboard, coming up with some screen saver or notepad app that was going to make me unbelievably rich. Did I mention I was like 14?
Being extremely nerdy had its advantages. When I was of age to enter the workforce and most of my friends were working at TCBY (not to knock it -- I did some time there, too), I was usually able to find office internships or part time jobs. When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked part time during the school year as a glorified office assistant in the three-person (including me) IT department of our small-town franchise Pepsi bottler/distributor office. Aside from the fact that being the lowest man on the (albeit short) totem pole meant that I got all of the grunt work, like re-stacking pallets of cases of copier paper, or keeping said copiers from running out of paper, or restarting various admin assistant's computers, it was a great gig.
One year, IT Guy #2 brought in something he had been playing with, Allaire Cold Fusion (with a space, at the time), and a few cobbled together pages backed by a Microsoft Access database. Ultimately, this became our company intranet. It evolved very rapidly from a dinky little portal of links to the various websites and tools that employees needed to a serious productivity powerhouse. By the time I left, we had some incredible things integrated -- alpha paging, webmail, randomized email and drug screening based on newspaper lotto numbers, role based security, and tons of reports based on data coming from the IBM AS/400. I think at its peak (before I left) we had about 30-40 users banging on it all day long as part of their job. That'll give a 17 year old some job satisfaction.
I mostly learned Cold Fusion from IT Guy #2 and the books he loaned me. And that was pretty much it until 2005. By day I went to college for the traditional Computer Science degree, with classical training in C, C++, Perl, Java, and the like; and by night I was a quiet, happy, productive, Cold Fusion 5-tagger; and I had no idea what that even was. I worked in various development shops around town (detailed in my about me page) over the years, most of which had but under-utilized Cold Fusion. After graduation I got married, and started poking around for other professional opportunities. I ended up landing a job 120 miles away in Pennsylvania (home town was in south-eastern Maryland) doing Cold Fusion programming for a consulting company. Somehow I convinced my wife that relocating a few months after getting married wasn't crazy, and we did. I suppose it didn't hurt that her family would be orders of magnitude closer.
I credit that consulting company, and in particular my boss there, Chuck McElwee (quick aside: HATE linking to sys-con, but I don't think that content is available anywhere else, and it's the only thing he's ever published!), with my rebirth into the world of ColdFusion. And hey... Wait a tick, what happened to the space?!
After I had a project or two under my belt working for Chuck, he suggested I attend CFUnited (2007) on work's checkbook. He said he saw a lot of potential in me and that I should start reading some CF blogs -- in particular, check out that Ray Camden fellow. Chuck showed me that there was life beyond CF 4.5 (which a majority of my clients were still using), and gave me the freedom and support to learn the new stuff. Oh, and he convinced me to take the certification exam. After CFUnited, I was hooked on the community.
Fast forward a few years and I'm now writing my own ColdFusion and Web Development blog (going strong since April 2007!), I'm the manager of the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group, I'm an Adobe Community Professional for CF, I'm on the CF Customer Advisory Board, I regularly attend and speak at conferences and user group meetings, I have more than a dozen ColdFusion open-source projects including my REST framework Taffy, and more recently, I just co-held my first conference: Philly Merge with (fellow ACP/ACC/CAB member, former Philly CFUG manager, and newly engaged) Steve Rittler.
So that's my story. What's yours? Feel free to leave a link in the comments.
in ColdFusion | 2 Responses 2011-08-01 08:00
Knowing first hand all the time you invested it's good to see it paying off so well. I'm really proud of you!