I’m a day late to the party but, at Steve Bryant’s suggestion here you have, less a quick overview of my CF origins and more a comprehensive history of my time online and in code.
Getting Online
The year was 1995 and my father returned home from work with a grin in place of his usual stressed smile. He clutched a small plain card box in his left hand and promptly disappeared into the study leaving echoes of instructions that he was not to be disturbed.
After a short time, from behind the closed, came a bizarre series of beeps and trills, repeated every couple of minutes and normally accompanied by muted cursing and frantic key stokes.
3 hours later and he emerged, stood outlined in the archway of the kitchen and proclaimed his triumph to the waiting masses … well to mum, my sister and I … “We have the internet now”.
It was a number of months before I was even allowed near this magical internet thingummy wotsit and, when I was finally permitted to connect it was under careful supervision… which mercifully waned after a few weeks.
Over the following months I spent happy hours surfing, emailing the limited collection of people I actually needed to email, discovering the joys of IRC and the wrath of a father who discovers an IRC client in his Programs folder.
Anyway, pottering around online and chatting to strangers in foreign parts was all well and good but I wanted to get my own space online and started looking into this HTML stuff. Hacking about in notepad and saving to local html files that then updated in the browser when I changed stuff was awesome! Using a combination of HotDog and Paintshop Pro (which had previously been used to build Worm’s levels) I put together my first “homepage” hosted by Angelfire (no Geocities for me … oh no!) and that was it … I was online!
Getting ma Code On
Like many of my generation in the UK, my first real exposure to computers was the BBC Micro* / BBC B computer system and hacking around in BBC BASIC. Friends of mine has Amiga’s & VIC 20s but it was the BBC that I had most access to thanks to my mother’s job as a primary school teacher. I must have spent days tapping away at the cursed keyboard, modifying games, writing my own and generally discovering the joys of programs.
The PC my dad brought home was an 8086 and brought with it the heady heights of QBasic – BBC BASIC’s faster, pinker cousin as well as some database thing (DBase something?) that I really wasn’t that interested in.
In the mean time school IT classes were doing their bit for my software development skills by making me drive a turtle round the floor on a big bit of paper … which is a skill I have never once needed to use again! It was in the maths department that the next generation of programming came to the fore when I was bought a TI-85 Graphing Calculator that featured a version of BASIC. I’ve lost count of the number of lunch hours spent writing games on a calculator! Careful keyboard entires and gratuitous use of GOTO statements produced versions of Snake, Blackjack (one of an entire range of Casino Programs I eventually wrote) and my crowing glory which would probably have gotten me expelled if the staff had found out about it – SimWipe**
Unfortunately it turned out I should have spent less time programming and more time listening to the minutiae of IBM mainframe configuration and punch card deployment (yup in 1996) in my IT classes as it became the only exam I’ve ever failed… go figure!
Getting started with ColdFusion # 1
My first exposure to ColdFusion was in 1999. A uni project needed a dynamic backend and we had ColdFusion installed so I thought I’d take a look … and promptly gave up. The gulf between my little basic projects and the whole web, query, database thing was just to great to get to grips with. Not to mention trying to install it via PWS on Windows 98 – I wasn’t a sys admin – I just wanted something to work for me.
I abandoned web development until 2002 when I was hired by a company specialising in Microsoft development, got paid to learn ASP and started to grok web development… Unfortunately, ColdFusion had slipped out of sight and out of mind and I spent the next few years working in ASP, ASP.NET, Perl & PHP as the internet bucked and swirled around my in a maelström of shifting trends and buzz words. CSS arrived closely followed by AJAX. Standards became a real thing and web development became a viable career. By the year 2008 I was a committed PHP developer and didn’t actually think I’d find anything else I enjoyed quite as much… how wrong I was.
Getting started with ColdFusion # 2
My real introduction to ColdFusion came in March 2009 when I joined my current employer. They had a legacy CMS which had been written in ColdFusion because “that was what the developer knew” and I would be expected to work on it.
I won’t lie, the initial jump from curly braces and semi colons to CFML was a bit of a headache. But I quickly came to love the simplicity and power that came with the language. Complex operations were suddenly reduced to single lines of code leaving me free to focus on actually developing a project and implementing other complex features without having to worry about chewing into my “coding time”.
It was still touch and go – I remain a massive fan of the open source ethic and working with a language that was owned by a single firm was something of a moralistic struggle … until I discovered Railo and that argument was effectively nullified.
The final point at which I decided to stop sitting on the fence and call myself a full-time ColdFusion developer? When I met (a sample of) the ColdFusion community first hand at SOTR 2010. I’ve been online for 15 years and have never met a group of people so supportive, so tolerant of new comers and they silly questions, so generally pleasant anywhere else on the web.
So that’s me – my name is Rob Dudley and I’m a ColdFusion developer and now you know how I got here.
* It’s always struck me a bit strange that it was a Broadcasting Corporation and not the government that was behind one of the largest computer in schools initiative in UK history. Either way the BBC are probably responsible for birthing more British coders from my generation than any other company at the time and for that I remain thankful – more on this fascinating project over at Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
** If you must know, SimWipe was a TiBASIC program that simulated, exactly, the memory wipe of the TI-85 calculator. It could be bound to a key and was basically designed to allow students to take formulae, notes and programs into final exams where they would have to “wipe” their calculators in front of the overseers. Whilst I’m sure this would have been considered “cheating” so far as I was concerned the exam board had already allowed students the use of incredibly powerful calculators in exams so why not allow us to use all of the functions available? It was equivalent to showing up at a Grand Prix only to be told you had to take your car back to common stock parts and lose all the clever innovations you’d spent years researching.
And if anyone is considering damning me for enabling cheaters remember that students still had to show their working so simple verbatim copying from a program they’d got off a mate would still result in a fail.