Once again, a journalist shows her ignorance by publicly declaring a heavily used, constantly updated and fully supported web language, dead. That’s right folks, time to start taking those Java training classes again, because all those thousands of ColdFusion applications being created every day are simply ignoring the fact that they are using a dead tool.

Take your blinders off, heed the voice of the Wise and All-Knowing Mary Brandel, and throw your Coldfusion Application Development books in the trash.

Seriously though, as has been discussed many times before, we all (including Adobe) need to be constantly acting as Ambassadors of ColdFusion when we go to user group meetings, local geek gatherings, or talking with people in our own companies. Only then will ColdFusion Ignorance be obliterated.

technorati tags:coldfusion, dead, ignorance, advocate

I’d like to post some of my thoughts and experiences now that I’ve been in the (quasi) South for three weeks. People are more friendly and more talkative (when they’re not behind the wheel, but more about that below). I’ve already held many meaningful conversations with grocery store clerks, cashiers, gas station attendants and a few random strangers.

Of course, after a certain point I realize that while I think the conversation is winding down and I can leave, they are just getting warmed up, ready to go for 15 more minutes. I get a very confused, and sometimes wounded, look when I abruptly end the now-20-minute-long conversation about the weather and rush out the door.

I’ve also noticed bacon everywhere. I see large containers of it sitting out in several restaurants (where I would never expect to see a large vat of bacon), on sandwiches of which I never considered bacon as a garnish, and every fast food place has SOMETHING with bacon on it. Now I like bacon, but when it becomes ubiquitous, it loses its charm.

Was there some governor of Tennessee that proposed that the turn signal was actually an invention by Yankess to cause brain damage in Southern babies so that the North could invade again? Perhaps cars sold in the south come covered with some kind of poisonous ichor. Whatever the reason, people in Nashville think that the turn signal is some kind of horrible scourge BECAUSE THEY NEVER USE IT!!!!

I’ve had 2 close calls of broadsiding someone and I’ve sat thorugh innumerable green lights thinking that the person coming the other way was going straight, only to then see them swoop to the left as the light is turning red leaving me trapped in the same spot through the next red light.

However, I’ve enjoyed the friendlier atmosphere where asking someone on the street a question isn’t returned with a derisive sneer or being completely ignored.

technorati tags:nashville, turn, signals, bacon, friendly, polite

Enough time has passed that I feel comfortable relating this story (it was on my mind this morning for some reason). I’d been job hunting for a while because my previous employer had hinted at financial problems, and I didn’t feel like going down with the ship this time. I’d done it twice previously and it wasn’t pretty, and now that I have a family, I didn’t want the added complications it would place on them.

After discussing my job search with my wife, we agreed that we should start targeting other areas of the country where my career would be more fruitful, since Pittsburgh had very few leads. After some investigation, we decided that Nashville, Raleigh and Charlotte would be my target areas.

This story revolved around The Company That Shall Remain Nameless [The Company].

I received a call in late January from a company in Charlotte that had seen my resume on one of the job boards; it was the VP of Operations of The Company, the person I would be reporting to if I had landed the job. They were looking for someone to come and take over managing one of their development departments. We had a 1.5 hour long conversation on the phone that we both agreed had gone well, and so we scheduled a day for me to drive down and meet with several people within The Company during a day-long interview.

I make the 7.5 hour drive from Pittsburgh to Charlotte with guarded optimism and make it to the office of The Company at 10:00 AM the next morning. I meet with my propsective supervisor during a lunch meeting, the CTO of The Company, and then with some of the team members that I would be supervising. All in all, I thought the day went well. Everyone asked very intelligent questions, and I have them very honest answers, and we all seemed to get along famously. I lastly spoke with the HR representative of The Company who said that I should hear from them within 4 days of their decision.

After 6 days went by, I finally sent an email inquiring as to the status of their decision, and received an email via a proxy agent. To paraphrase the email, it basically said that everyone had felt the interview went poorly and that to the most common feedback was, while they felt I was certainly capable of performing the duties of the position, I had not displayed enough humility and would, therefore, not fit into their corporate culture.

This took me aback, as I had never received feedback like that in my life. While I consider myself very confident in my abilities, voice my opinions, and have leadership qualities, I am by no means an arrogant or conceited person. It made me wonder what kind of person that they were, in reality, looking for. Was it someone who would be under the thumb of the Operations officer, and simply towed the company line? I explained to them how strongly I felt about enhancing the team environment, my passion for education and teaching others, and my heavy committment to collaboration. To this day I can’t think of anything that warranted such a response from them, and, to be honest, I’m somewhat glad that I didn’t end up there; I have a feeling it wouldn’t have lasted long.

I finally ended up with a company that was looking for talented, confident and ambitious employees, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, that’s not true, I’d be much happier if Michelle and Sabrina were back home already.

technorati tags:employment, humility, job, search

Even though it was glossed over during Ben’s presentation at the Nashville CFUG, I was very pleased to see that Adobe will now be supporting JBoss as an application server for ColdFusion.  I spent the last 2.5 years figuring out the best ways to get ColdFusion apps to run on JBoss AS and I’ve found it far more flexible and more easily configurable than running on the native JRun AS – I’m also not an expert on JRun, so I may be a bit biased.

I was also pleased to see that Scorpio will be shipped with the 1.6 JDK as the default.  This means that I can now use all the latest framework and Java libraries (such as JAI, however much of my work with that has been made obsolete by the new CFIMAGE tag) without ColdFusion yelling at me.

I’d love to describe all of my favorite features, but since many of them have been blogged about already…

• Javascript style operators
• AJAX controls and JSON serialization
• Argument collections
• Syndication with CFFEED
• Server monitoring

I hope to get into the Beta problem quickly so that I can get it all running on the latest JBoss AS release and see how well it all performs (a.k.a. beat the crap out of it).

Tonight I’m attending my first Nashville CFUG meeting, and what a fortuitous time to move to Nashville. Ben Forta, a product evangelist for ColdFusion, is coming in for the meeting to do a presentation on the next release of the ColdFusion line – called Scorpio.

I’m looking forward to meeting some of the people behind the names that I see pop up on the CF-Talk list and getting to know my peers in my new hometown.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get in on the Scorpio Beta like I did for CFMX 7 so all of this material will be new to me, and I’m hoping that there are features that we can use with some applications at work. Of course, I’m especially anxious to see if Adobe added JBoss to the list of supported servers for the new version and what version of Java will be supported.

It was interesting to see what other people wanted to be included with Scorpio.

technorati tags:cfug, nashville, scorpio, coldfusion, ben, forta, jboss