Entries Tagged as 'Community'

Processing Directive - CodeBass Radio

If you've been living under a rock, there's a new internet radio station called Codebass Radio where geek and music combine. The executive producer and person responsible for it all, Vicky Rider, has been pulling together an impressive list of geeks to make this all happen. The geeks came together and made their own Adobe AIR based media player, Mediaslurp.

Codebass Radio has been growing into its own little community on twitter #CodeBassRadio. I joked to Vicky that I was going to make a station on Codebass and it was going to play music for the hard of hearing (read: a lot of bass). She, of course, was receptive to the idea and kept pestering me about it. Months went by and I finally managed to submit Episode 1 to her on the 21st of October.

So, it appears I have a regular timeslot now after Daria's Cheat Sheet. I've named the show Processing Directive and hopefully a new episode will appear every week at 3PM EST. Not sure if repeats will happen during the week, but you might have to keep tabs on @CodeBass on twitter to get the daily schedule. I'll be mostly playing Techno / Industrial tunes, but I have no qualms about tossing in dubstep or bass heavy metal if I need to. I've been told that what I have is good coding music, so if I can make the hour fly while you're coding, I think I've done a decent job.

Processing Directive, putting the bass back in CodeBass Radio. ;)

Oh, there's plenty of room for shows, so if this is just up your alley and you'd like to give it a shot, you should contact Vicky.  If I can do it, you most certainly can.

How I got started in ColdFusion

Today is "How I got started in ColdFusion" day, a great idea suggested by Steve Bryant.

Back in the mid 90s, I was working for a Mom & Pop ISP as a "Webmaster." The problem with Mom & Pop ISPs is that sometimes they weren't so reliable in paying. After my 2nd bounced check, I decided that it was time to leave. I came back to the PA area, specifically around Pittsburgh because my older brother was living in the area and he let me crash on the couch while I was looking for a job.

In '97, I landed a job at a place called MetalExchange (later renamed to MetalSite). I was doing Tech Support at first, but being employee number 11 (out of 200 something), you eventually start moving up through the ranks. I got promoted to QA. They sent me to a ColdFusion class so that I would be able to assist better with QA.

A bunch of us went to class and Glenda Vigoreaux was our teacher for the "Fast Track to ColdFusion 4.0" training. The CTO at the time saw that I was picking up CFML faster than some of the other programmers and that was basically because I wasn't struggling with all the HTML tags and such.

A week later, after training, they promoted me to a developer. I started picking up contacts with people at Allaire and hanging out on the forums and learning even more. Two months after that, I was promoted to a manager. I was responsible for getting all the new developers in the door more training (which, we brought Glenda back twice more to Pittsburgh for).

Around 2001 or so, the company started going downhill (dot com bubble popped) and I jumped ship having survived 2 rounds of layoffs. I found a little firm in Pittsburgh that was looking for a ColdFusion developer for a 6 month contract that could possibly lead to long term. I came on as a consultant. 6 months later, I signed on full time.

11 years later, I'm still with the same company. I've worked with a lot of big name clients in the Pittsburgh area.

I've had a lot of great opportunities thanks to my adventures with ColdFusion (Team Macromedia, Going to Japan for my previous job, Meeting awesome people at conferences, etc). The only rough patch when I was really starting to doubt ColdFusion was when ColdFusion MX was released (6.0, 6.01... 6.02 was semi-stable).

My opinion on the Modern Age of ColdFusion

Last week, Adam Lehman posted The Modern Age of ColdFusion. You should go read it.  The TL;DR version is that Adam Lehman and Alison Huselid have been shifted to the Flashbuilder team. I've been reading a lot of responses online since that announcement.

The biggest concern I see from people is ColdFusion X is now completely in the hands of the team over in India. If you're not already aware of this, ColdFusion has been primarily developed over there since CF8. Adam and Alison's job was here in the States and now everything is over there and I'm sure from a business standpoint, this makes sense.

A noticeable pattern that I've been reading online:

  • Adobe team being in a so-called ivory tower and they never listen to what we want.

Mr. Lehman and I may have always had our differences and were plenty vocal about them on twitter, but the one thing that I will defend Adam on is that he was unapproachable. This couldn't be any further from the truth. The man broadcasted his email once or twice a day on twitter and he responded to the community in a timely fashion. I get that twitter may not have been everyone's method of communication, but how hard is it to ask anyone that's active in the community if they had Adam Lehman's email address?

My only concern with the two positions being shifted? Is that Adam's replacement has still yet to say a peep to the community, but perhaps they're waiting for everything to quiet down.

If I had to ask Adobe for a favor, I would ask that the next product manager continue Adam's tradition of being just as approachable and active in the community as he was. If I had to ask the community for a favor, I would ask that you continue requesting features and reporting issues as you find them.

I'd like to thank Adam Lehman for the time he has put into the community and more importantly, thanks for stopping by Pittsburgh and listening to the little guys for a day.