A bit closer to home this time.

My family’s company back home has been running a ColdFusion-powered site that I wrote for them yyeeeeaaarrrsss ago. My sister, who is now running the marketing department, wants to do an overhaul of the site, because it has been yyeeeeaaarrrsss since the first version.

Obviously, I’m not available to help them out full time – y’know, being four states away with a wife and two kids and all – and she’s found it impossible to find anyone with ColdFusion skills back in Pittsburgh. She’s made the decision to use PHP as the technology for the new site.

Kinda speaks for itself there.

Weird that I’ve been a small time evangelist for ColdFusion all these years and recently all I’ve been hearing about is how people are deciding to not use it any more.

What’s going on?

Was speaking with a friend back home today who works for a very large financial institution. They currently have a major investment in the Adobe stack of technologies, including ColdFusion. However, the decision was recently made – as usual, at a business level – to become a Microsoft shop.

One of the critical elements in this was the fact that ColdFusion developers, specifically highly talented ones that can architect enterprise level applications, simply did not exist in the marketplace. There are too few of them, and they are all currently employed, and the cost of developing someone of this caliber was simply too high and would take too long.

I’ve read far too many times in the past 12 years about how Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe does not make the appropriate efforts to get the ColdFusion development platform into the hands of kids early, when they are learning development, so that when these kids coming out of college enter the workforce they know Microsoft or Java technologies, or both, and then may possibly, occasionally, touch upon a couple of features of the ColdFusion platform years later.

The result is more and more business decision makers not even considering it as an option. Technology aside here people, look at it from a business perspective. Ok, fine, ColdFusion is a great platform. It has lots of features and is easy to learn.

So what?

I need to hire 9 people right now who have vast, deep experience in building mission critical applications that perform at the highest level, scale with the organization and the user base, and are extensible so that we can keep making it better.

Having gone through this process many times myself… I’m sorry but ColdFusion doesn’t cut it. I love the platform, I love the people, and the community, but if I got funding to build a major application or system, and needed a large, experienced development team, I would not choose ColdFusion.

Now, once the system got off the ground and the underlying architecture was solid and we needed to start expanding the system, making sub-projects from it, then sure I’d consider hiring a few ColdFusion developers because you can build applications very quickly with and perform some integrations more easily.

Bottom line is that, while I’m sad to see another promising ColdFusion shop being slowly dismantled over the next two years, I can’t say I disagree with the decision.

It sucks.

These past few weeks, I’ve been pulling some major hours to complete two projects. One is almost four weeks past its original production release date because of modified requirements (shocking!) and, thus, has pushed the project that I was supposed to start after it back – now at two weeks behind.

Two weeks ago, I was up to 58 hours and last week I was over 70. This week, I’m on track to hit that mark again. I’m telling you, it’s nowhere near as easy at forty as it was at thirty. Every night I go to bed utterly exhausted. When I get home at night and spend time with my daughters, I find doing simple things to be tiring and my patience level has significantly decreased.

My dreams, almost always very strange, become absolutely psychedelic when I’m this tired and for about eights nights in a row now, I’ve woken up ready to start writing a book. Perhaps this is how Stephen King comes up with all his weird ideas.

I see some light at the end of the tunnel, and by the time the holidays hit, I’ll be ready for some serious R&R. I’ll just tell my wife to hide the eggnog from me this year.

As the birth of my second daughter is looming, I’ve been considering something lately: What does becoming a father do to a man who has devoted his life to technological pursuits?

In short, it highlights how neutral technology is. It can be used for malicious purposes, but at the same time can be used to protect.

As a self-described technologist, I recall many fond times of staying up until 3 a.m. learning the latest programming languages, design patterns, and software projects. My ability to learn and absorb technical issues and apply them to business problems has always been a source of pride for me.

Lately, though, I’ve been finding that my thoughts about technology are starting to wander into previously unknown territory. It all started one day when I realized that in the technology-driven culture of youth today, that it is inevitable that the day will come when my daughter will know more about some technologies than I will. Whether it be through conscious study or the latest tech fad of which Dad is totally clueless, she’ll have a store of knowledge that surpasses mine and I have to be prepared for that.

Many people I have talked to over the years see “Technology” as something inherently evil because their exposure to it is limited and they only see media coverage that shows how it can be misused. I can’t blame them. You’ll never see a story on ABC news about how involved parents were able to protect their children. It’s not newsworthy.

Most of us have watched shows, or at least heard of, how Internet predators have ingenious ways of getting to young kids. Today, the tools are fairly rudimentary: IM clients, MySpace pages, web cams, and text messages. Monitoring these activities might be daunting for some parents, but is laughably simple for someone with my technical savvy.

However I can’t stop thinking about what will be available in 12 years when my daughters are becoming young women, start making forays into broader social circles, and explore new things. I find myself sitting on the couch while my daughter dances to a catchy Bunny Town song thinking of inventive ways that I can ensure her safety without becoming an overbearing parent that unduly invades her privacy.

Thankfully, others in technical fields share my concerns and find interesting and effective ways to help combat threats to children (see how Google is helping).

There are a lot of angry, misguided, immature, and simply disturbed people in the world with easy access to a computer. By keeping my finger on the pulse of technology, I will ensure that I can always find ways to battle those who wish to abuse it to the harm of my children.

I recently moved the family to some new digs south of Nashville, and the house is nice, has plenty of space, but we are unfortunately still renting while I replenish my cash reserves. I had setup my home office in the upstairs 4th bedroom, but the Tivo and Xbox were downstairs in the living room.

I’m also a wired kinda guy. I know the Xbox and Tivo will both work wirelessly, but if I can plug directly into the network, I always feel better. The problem is, since I’m renting, my ability to effectively get a wire from upstairs to downstairs is significantly hampered. No drilling, no modifying the existing wiring the house, etc.

To my delight, as I was wandering around Best Buy last week (had to replace my monitor cable since the dog had chewed through it), I stumbled across a box from Netgear – Powerline Ethernet Adapters. I wish I had known about these back when I lived in Pittsburgh. I had wires running all over the house and in the walls. These would have saved me a lot of weekend hours and sweat.