Well, not quite yet, but since I’m going to be out of pocket the next several days, I wanted to put this out now. Monday, March 22 will mark 10 years since I began my “journey” with ColdFusion. That day in 2000 was my first day in a class called “Fast Track to ColdFusion”.
The class was taught by Sean Hedenskog in San Jose, CA where the headquarters for the company I was working for at the time was located. That company had decided on Allaire Spectra 1.0 as the basis for an enterprise content management system so several of us went through the Fast Track to ColdFusion course in preparation for Spectra training some weeks later.
I know there are are a lot of people out there who have more time with ColdFusion than I do. I started with version 4.5 and, if memory serves, our company was one of the first to deploy ColdFusion and Spectra onto Solaris-based servers. Even so, I feel like I’m somewhat of an old-timer these days. That’s a good thing however, since it means we’re getting more and more new people using ColdFusion.
A lot has changed in the 10 years since I started that class. Coming from a strictly HTML background with a little bit of classic ASP thrown in, even the beginner class posed quite a challenge for me. Simple things we don’t give second thoughts to such as calling a custom tag (there were no UDFs or CFCs then remember) were hard for me to get my head around. I remember having an especially difficult time trying to figure out how arrays and structures worked
Along the way I’ve been privileged to associate with some very talented and helpful folks. Not long after we started the Spectra project, my company brought in some folks from the Allaire consulting group. Matt Stevanus was one of those folks and quickly became a great friend and mentor. We kept in touch periodically after that project was over and a little over 3 years ago I got the opportunity to work with Matt again when I started consulting with Universal Mind.
A couple years ago I met another guy who would help shape my professional career–Dan Wilson. Dan is widely known these days as a driving force behind the ModelGlue project. Dan and I had an opportunity to work on a long-term project together and he and I’ve enjoyed working with him on various things ever since. It was Dan that really got me over the “OO hump”, convinced me that I needed to start blogging more and to submit topics to various conferences to speak on.
Finally, there are dozens of people out in the ColdFusion community doing blog posts, open source projects, MeetUps and more that have contributed to my success. To everyone, I say a hearty “THANKS!” (and my mortgage company loves you too).
So, here’s looking back at a great 10 years while looking forward to many more ahead!