How I got started with ColdFusion
posted under category: Life Events on August 1, 2011 at 12:00 am by Nathan
August 1st 2011 is "How I started ColdFusion" day, thanks to Steve Bryant.
This may not be entirely fantastic, but it's my story.
I was working at 7x, a start-up web design and development company in Anchorage, AK. there were only a small handful of those when I started out of high school in 1997. Development at 7x was all based on Tango; the "server" was a mac, Tango would crash often and there was only one guy who could hack it. We started hearing about ColdFusion as a better web platform. A little positive press and the CEO was sold.
The following year, 7x sent 3 of us to a week of training in Seattle. The other two with me wore those customer relations, project manager and designer hats, and I was really a web producer or content engineer at the time. My business cards actually said I was the 'Sr Web Slinger'.
Thinking back I can't believe how naive I was at the time. I knew so little. The world was all blurry to me.
The training was an Allaire class put on by a guy who drove down from Vancouver, BC (as opposed to Vancouver WA where I was born). Nice guy, I think his name was Jonathan. We actually went through two classes in the week, first was a web development (in general) class, then the "Cold Fusion" class. I think I was the only one of the three of us from 7x who seemed to really get what was being taught in the CF class. It's that technical brain of mine I guess.
This was my first business trip. We toured Seattle, I visited my uncle in Kirkland, discovered GameWorks and Ikea, and made some life-long friends.
They put me right to work when I came back, working on shopping carts and early CMS-like apps. I sure hope none of that code is still running today.
So, here's to the bright future! I hope I can look back at this time and say "I knew so little" 13 years further down the road.