Monday, August 01, 2011

How I Got Started In ColdFusion

This post is inspired by Steve Bryant's suggestion to make August 1st, 2011 the "How I Got Started In ColdFusion" day.

My story is quite simple but it started back in 1998-99, can't quite pin point the date. You see I was a musician (kinda still am - you can check out anytime you want but you you can never leave) and that was pretty much my life. It consumed me and it was all that mattered and all that I would work for. So one day my band needed a website and they asked me to go ahead and find a company to do it for us. After some research we found out that what we wanted would end up costing us over $2,000 and the problem with that was, we were broke! Not broke, like man I can't go out tonight ... some of us were so broke - like living at the studio that I practiced in and eating friend's leftovers - yeap me. Oh well, one of the guitarist's had an uncle that decided to help us and with that, so I tagged along and learned how to create my first site in ... FrontPage, I know the horror. It was not long before I purchased an HTML book and started to learn more on my own and with help of other friends they got me off FontPage and introduced me to my love, Dreamweaver.

I know, what about ColdFusion? Well the same friend that got me off FrontPage said, "hey how cool would it be to capture people's emails on your band's website" (FYI - this was another band now - about a year later) and I was like "yeah, cool how can we do it". He then said, there is this language called ColdFusion and it makes it painfully simple. He said all you need to know was 3 tags and you could be a rockstar ... introduction to cfquery, cfoutput and  cfmail. Needless to say, after a few months I went to work for this friend and within months I outgrew the company and had the opportunity to go out on my own.

Since then I have worked on many projects, met many wonderful people and even was able to fly to London because of an application that I built (purchased by LabOne - now owned by Quest - no I am not rich, this was my hard lesson learned back in '01) and all this because of 3 little tags. Well, more than 3 tags because that was only the beginning. I was not satisfied with 3 tags, I wanted to learn more and so I did and still continue to do so everyday. I am now the South Florida ColdFusion User's Group co-manager and I am glad to give back everyday what a dear friend of mine gave me so long ago and that is an introduction to a language that changed my life and has given one opportunity after another.

To my dear friend Matt Mehler, not only did you give me this blessing but without you I would never be where I am at today and with the wonderful woman I call my wife, thank you for having her answer my calls - I know I was hard to deal with.