You can read the show notes and download the episode here
Michaela Light 0:01
Welcome back to the show today we've got an exciting episode about learn CF in a week, which is an amazing website, free training. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag there on the how it's priced. And I've actually got three experts who helped put together local fusion in a week we've got Dan frederick's of the North Virginia CPG. We've got Dave Bergson, who's joining us from sunny California, and Carl von Stephen. And I'm forgetting where in the country you are call California as well. Another sunny California is on the other end at the other end of California, the Republic of Northern California. So I'm cool. Well,
glad you all could join us here and I think we should start off because not everyone knows what this thing is learn CF in a week. What exactly is it?
Daniel Fredericks 0:52
I'm gonna let Dave mentioned this because Dave is one of the originals. Just a quick history that did
was part of this originally when they put it together five, six years ago. That's been a while. And then he realized that we that it needed to be upgraded. So he conned or asked both Carl and myself to join in. And we've been sort of helping administer putting the new thing together. So Dave can probably give you a better sense of where learns the up for week came from DEF CON with cookies is probably a good, good thing, but I still haven't given you the cookies. So.
Dave Ferguson 1:29
So, backstory like Dan said learn CF in a week was started a long time ago to try and bridge the gap between somebody wanting to learn the language and just reading help documentation.
We can go online and go to CF docs and wherever else you want you to figure out how to write certain tags and so on and so forth. But there was nothing to really say if you're new to the language. Here's how you would start here's how you would finish and kind of just help you along the way versus just hunting and packing up.
You're out what is what? So originally started by,
was diamond, Simon free. His team spearheaded the initial right. And he got a whole bunch of us involved. We all wrote little pieces and parts and things like that. It was written for an older version of cold fusion, I think.
So you can see of 10 maybe, originally, and then as CF versions came out, it wasn't really upgraded. And there wasn't much in the language that changed drastically. They really needed to be upgraded. But with the most recent version of cF 2018, we're like, you know what, we really need to revamp this and make it more modern in the examples and not only the website itself, but the examples that it shows and so on and so forth. So I think what was it couple CF summits ago, um, I approached Dan and Carl and said, Hey, I got this idea. What do you guys
thinking they're like, Good idea. Great. Fast forward a year, we really didn't get much traction because you're trying to find a lot of people to help us with it. We eventually after a year of poking and prodding people, we finally got Adobe on board to help out with some stuff. We got a lot of other people involved to help write it, but actually fully rewrite it. Just redo the examples to make them more current.
So ultimately, like I said, it's it's the it's the gap between how do I write this tag? How do I make something
and just trying to help people along the way to
to get their foot in the door of writing the language that we all know is very simple to write, but hard to master.
Great, I don't have called you wants to add anything to that. Oh,
Carl Von Stetten 3:54
no. Well, we did get a pretty good mixture of original contributors reviewing their sections.
And were some of the original contributors have now moved on to other languages or other other jobs that aren't involving cold fusion as much anymore. We were able to find other community members to review the original, those original sections.
So it's still sort it's still working progress. The the new version of it isn't available yet, but it will be soon.
And I think the next thing we have to do is we also need to go through the actual hands on the course.
But the practical lab material and get that stuff a little bit refreshed as well. But the the actual course, pages themselves are pretty close to being ready to go.
So if someone goes to learn and see if it's an online course or an E book cool what it's currently there is an ebook offered but I not sure we're going to continue offering that once we're done with the
Right, currently is an online course you can just go through step by step, there's a PDF, to get all the material as well. But yeah, the ebook may fall by the wayside. And there's some sample files to buy think, yep, yeah, there's a whole ton of samples on the entire site itself, as well as all the samples are, will be available on GitHub, so everybody can just poke through there, as well as um, yeah, so I'll put some more on that later. But yeah, it's all there. And so this is like comprehensive training to get someone up to speed on cold fusion. Is that the idea? Yeah, and the company I work for, that's when we hire somebody new that has no cold fusion experience. They have to go through this course. That's their first thing they do.
And how's that worked? They actually come out at the end of a week really being able to code in cold fusion.
Yeah. To the extent that we need them to jump into our system and write code. Maybe Maybe not our systems really advanced but it
gives them a better understanding of what is what and how things interconnect versus, like I said, looking at some tags and finance doing a search on what, what is CF output?
It kind of helps figure put all that together. So when I look at code, it doesn't look so weird. For sake of it, but I'm,
that's amazing. I mean, usually training for a week costs thousands of dollars, how much does it cost to take learn CF in a week?
Ah, it's free, hundred percent free, hundred percent free. Right? We charge you nothing, we get nothing except your smiling face that you you learn something new.
And it's open source as well as that true. Yes, it is. So anyone who wants to help improve it or you can help out, be one of those famous contributors when you contribute a page.
Yes. So once we get once we get it all up and running right now the, the,
the group the submission is closed. But once we get it all done, we'll open it up and allow
Anybody do pull requests into it to make modifications
Unknown Speaker 7:04
that they
that they that they might think we should use
to not only just a not only just examples, but the site itself. So,
and hopefully we'll get more people doing that as well, when they see that, you know, our English was not 100% perfect in a sentence structure or they say a better example would be x instead of what we use. So hopefully we will get more community involvement with that as well. Yep.
So this originally came out around 2010. somewhere around there. Yeah, right around the I think it was a little after the release of cF 10. So yeah, right around that area.
So is it for all versions of cold fusion, or it's only for the latest one, or
we updated the samples to match the latest version. But a cold fusion is very well known to be back very backwards compatible. So it will work going backwards. However, there may be code in there that you're using a older version of cold fusion may or may not work for you.
I would say it you guys could correct me if I'm wrong. It probably supports all the versions that that Adobe support. So 1111 2016 and 2018.
That's probably a fair statement to make.
And then what about Lucy do some coding in that? Is it good for them to like Adobe, Kofi?
Like I said, Yeah, Adobe helped us out
with some of this. So there are some considerations we had to make with doing that. So there aren't any Lucy examples. It's all written for Adobe ICF. But the majority of it, I don't think I don't see why it wouldn't work. And Lucy, there may be some slight variances. But those aren't noted.
The site is off.
Cool. So tell me about some of the cool features in CF in a way?
Well, I think it's chapter once you get through sort of the introductory material, each chapter will walk you through a fairly basic explanation of one particular facet of the language and the features. And then you'll go through some of the sections have more than more than one, subsection, maybe one we're up to like I think the longest section section may have six sub sections. And then you get into the hands on exercises. So you'll take the sample code, and you'll you'll start to it'll give you instructions on how to modify that code to accomplish what that the goal of that hands on session. And then each one builds on the person this one. So for an end user, if they get stuck, if they can't quite get something working, there are solutions in the hands on code as well. So they can go sneak peek at the solution, figure out maybe what they weren't quite doing right. And then they can move on to the next one.
Daniel Fredericks 10:15
And from a high level, it's you think about the what you if you looked at cold call Adobe cold fusion, you said what do I need? What are the main topics and that which we always talk about our decision making in our scopes, or our data types? how to how to query the database. What is what is application CFC, then you get into to other things such as RM and caching and big topic of security. So these are from what I know this, those were the big topics that people talked about when they first put this together. And we've we didn't change any of those topics, we kept all the ones that were there originally. Just so that if you if you needed to build an app from from zero, row 200%, these with these topics will be able to help you.
Dave Ferguson 11:03
Yep. And and correct me if I'm wrong here, damn. But I think we're moving to have the room right now, if you go to say there's a lot of install instructions. And we're going to replay replacing those with using command box.
Hopefully, this all works smooth.
That's like that's the goal. Yeah.
Michaela Light 11:24
You know, we've all very modern of you to do that I congratulate you on including command box. And that because that's the way to use cold fusion these days.
And it's it's a lot easier to install then than the instructions, they had words, they go download the Developer Edition of ACF and do all these things to set it up. Whereas command box will make it so much easier. The main goal, and
that is to kind of remove a barrier of entry.
And try and streamline getting people involved with you just say, hey, install command box, do this. And then you're up and running. Versus here's 20 50 instructions on how to get it up and running. makes it much simpler, much easier for somebody to just jump in and do.
What would you say this is kind of basic cold fusion or intermediate or advanced? Or what what kind of completed this? How would it?
I would say it's it's basic to intermediate. There are some some small, advanced things in it. But it was intended to be as a jumping off point for getting somebody going with cold fusion. So we wanted to avoid as much of the advanced concepts as much as possible. I mean, there's stuff in there like like object orientation or and stuff like that. But nothing super advanced just for lack. Yeah. Whatever you would consider super advanced. We kind of cool, we've dumbed it down, but not we'll take that in the wrong way.
Yeah, I mean, things you might need to do in your first app, or if you're maintaining an app, stuff you need no, yeah. I mean, looking through the table of contents for it, it does seem to have some intermediate things in there, like caching and security, internationalization and all kinds of cool stuff. So and I see you have a what to do next section. So when people have finished it, you give them some guidance on where to go, they want to learn more. So it's very cool. So you said you've put developers, you know, non cold fusion programmers through this, and they've come out after a week, you know, 40 hours of studying and tried doing the examples? And did they need, you know, help from another developer, or they basically, were able to do it all on their own using this course,
as far as I know, everybody's been able to make it through on their own?
Wow. I must mean, you wrote the coolest, pretty well,
God, I hope so.
Man, it's been somebody The first time I looked at this, and you look at the names, if you go on here, and you look at the names of the original list, they were all people that were well known, well respected in the community five years ago, when they were all either at conferences, or you went online, and you were looking up information. And there they were, those were those were the people so. And that's why when some of them left, we still tried to find some names in the community that people would recognize whether they're newer in the community that are blogging a lot or at conferences, just because it's nice to see that name out there to help you out to know, okay, I've met them at a conference or I see them blogging, they they should know what they're what they're talking about.
Even me Even my name
Yeah, yeah. But you will part of the Adobe CFC? My East key, you know, Dan, so you now you're famous before you were anonymous? Yes, yes.
I'm not so sure. I'm famous for keeping my time within eight minutes. But hey, you know, we're
all downhill from here, then.
Unknown Speaker 15:14
Absolutely. I'll say for myself, I've been working with cold fusion for a long time. And in reviewing the site and working with Dave and Dan on this, there are parts of cold fusion that I've never used, just haven't had to and my date my day to day job. And so I found the sections on like document handling and RM back actually were useful to me, even though I've been using cold fusion a long time, those are features that I've never really take advantage of. So, you know, from that perspective, I thought it was it was helpful for even for someone who's got an you know, an advanced experience with cold fusion, maybe there are pieces of it that have never been used to never been needed before. And this is a good way to get your get your, your toes wet with those features.
I don't know, I know, I've read the downloaded course and book three or four times because there's always something that I need to catch up on or you go out and you do a Google search for something you're looking for. And half the time it does bring up learn CF in a week. So there's the way it was written was good enough where Google finds a lot of information in it. So it's Yep.
Yeah. And then it's interesting, when you look at the like the, the table of contents for the course, there was, I remember back there were, I think, about two or three months of discussion over that list. And there was a lot of thought that went into the order of that list as well. Trying to walk somebody through going from just starting to making something full blown to adding other things along the way to enhance the application. So while we're now we're just basically fixing it to make it current, the initial groundwork took a long time to, to make it so all we have to do now is just fix the fix the examples and make it look prettier.
I think one of the advantages of this discourse over some of the other learning materials that have been out there for years like the the old CF, a web application can construction kit, the sea of black books, these examples are a little bit more clean. We've updated the code to also reflect more modern coding practices wherever possible, using script in favor in lieu of tags whenever possible. But I think that coming into this as the as your first learning opportunity for cold fusion, you will be better position to, to code in, in in the more modern standards and not the way that things have been taught for years where everything's in a CFL page where everything's all and hard to maintain over the lifespan and now that of an application, I think we're it lays a good groundwork for someone to start off on the right foot in the end with developing with confusion.
Yeah, and I one thing, one thing that's good to point out too is, this wasn't written by like a document writer. For developers, this was written by developers for developers. So the writers knew the audience right out the gate, which definitely geared more towards a different style of writing to make it way more understandable for the intended audience.
is great.
How is it on? You know, you? You said you updated the examples, does it? Talk about some of the new features in cF 2018? Or, you know, really, kind of classic cold fusion?
Yeah, I think it is the we redid the examples to be current, but I don't think we actually went out and included anything that's
Yeah, I don't think so I from
we've talked about it, about doing we talked about doing some more. And we and we realized it with our initial time constraints that we put on ourselves originally, that we wanted to just do what we had. And we've we've thrown the idea around about doing and getting more people to work on an advanced topic. So so things like your closures and your member functions and getting into query execute and getting into API and and frameworks themselves and, and dependency injection and more things like that, that then can take this into like a 200 level course instead of just a 100 to 150.
Yeah. And keep in mind, the intended audience was getting somebody that had little to no experience ends to being able to write code or look at code and know what they were looking at. So in thinking along those lines, when we were looking at at making it more current, we didn't really need to take any of the new stuff that's been added, since it was originally written. And add all this new stuff that's been added to our language granted, yeah, we need to make the examples current. But we don't need to add in all the stuff because all that new stuff doesn't help you learn the basics of the language.
Make sense? Oh, this is to get you started. And then you can hit the ground running, if you have to use some of those newer features,
I can say one of the biggest things we did talk about was we really did want to move it away. I guess moving away is a bad word. But do more with CF script. I think the the original authors did a great job of adding script in there, I think we wanted to make that the focus, because you take somebody from a different language, a JavaScript, for example, or whatnot that have hence the tie into that tie into a cold fusion back end, they'll understand it better it because it's it's similar to what they're, they're used to. So if we are bringing somebody from a different language, it might just make more sense to them, then reading tags, whereas us coming from doing this forever tags was our first first understanding
Carl Von Stetten 21:19
that if I remember correctly, one of the chapters specifically, I think it's the one that deals with nail, I believe that the original author has revised it. So we actually got the same person to come back and revisit it. And I believe he rewrote all of the code examples in scripts. So all of the tag stuff is now removed from the there's like one example with tags and the whole rest of it is now in script. So I think it's a little bit more that it gives new users a better match to other languages, they may be familiar with JavaScript or other scripting languages, object oriented, scripting, scripting languages, you'll be a little bit more familiar to them.
Yeah. And I think I did the same thing. When I redid the data handling section, we're now it's all script first. And then here's some tag examples if you need them, but it's all focusing on script, trying to make it more like dancing more relatable, everybody else.
I think that's a great thing to have start with the script, but also have some examples with tags because some people are going to be maintaining some legacy cold fusion code and they are going to encounter tags in the wild.
Yep. You can't write everything in script. There are times where you need tags.
So you mentioned programmers from other languages, being able to use this to come up to speed really fast in cold fusion and a week is like, incredible. I know, I read an Adobe, in the Adobe evangelism kit, they said to learn Java from scratch is, you know, months time typically, though, that's a real productivity boost there. Yeah, well about Yeah, go ahead.
Nothing. If you have programming background, picking up another language isn't that hard, depending on how its presented to you to learn. And I think that's where how we presented it to learn to somebody that knows support, right makes it very easy for them to jump forward, jump in and start and be going.
Do you cover things that might be gotchas for someone coming from another language with another language approaches things a bit differently, or?
I don't believe we do.
Now, I think I think it is just straight up cold fusion, how it's how it's written. That might be something interesting to think about. If we do get a lot around to a advanced, advanced version, having certain things specially like when you get into your, your closures, for example, your MapReduce filter each is there, there's slightly different, there might be slightly differences in how a JavaScript handles it or another language. And maybe that would be the type of place where we would throw something like that. And I mean, that's more to also for the people, the the end user, that if they if they want to see, hey, I'm used to writing Java or I'm used to writings are bad example of you starting a PHP, and I have to send mail in PHP, can you give me a example of a PHP way to a cold fusion way so I can make the relationship? I mean, that's something if you want to me just I don't see any problem with us doing it. It's not something we were actually, I don't think anybody's ever asked for Hurry up until a little bit now. We were actually brought up. Yeah.
So you talked about, you know, people who programming other languages using this, learn it? Is it realistic for someone who's coming from a design or an HTML background to use this learn cold fusion? Or is it not designed that way? Or
I would say it is perfect for that, because of the first couple chapters talking about the basic. And that I if I remember correctly, the first chapter does do script and tag right next to each other. So you when you see a tag, it'll make a lot of sense to I think a person who comes from a front end, understanding what an HTML tags are like. So personally, I would, I would say yes. Yeah.
Do you have any idea how many people have used this to learn cold fusion?
I, I wish we had statistics. But no, unfortunately, wasn't baked into the original version.
I do know over the last five years or so you hear people talk about it. So I know. You know, I've had different jobs that I've been at last two or three jobs since it's been out there. I know. I've mentioned anybody I've talked to that wanted to understand anything about about CF, I say, go here first. Or hey, I want to learn a little bit more about it go here first. So we have we don't have numbers, but I know that you see it out there. You've seen people talk about it. And I've heard people talk about so I think that it has it has reached a large audience.
So I'm kind of curious if people didn't use this what what other ways could they do to learn cold fusion?
trial and error?
Probably not. Because you don't really know how things interconnected and why they interconnect. You could go to like CF docs and stuff like that to learn what the tags are. But you really don't know when or why do you use certain tags. And that's kind of what learn CF and a week helps me with is the why.
And there's a there's a couple books here and there. I pump up the artists team. I know luis who loves to write books all the time. I know he wrote a, like a learn CF and 100 minutes or something like that. So people here and there have written various, either long blog posts or, or a couple of books and whatnot. But there's there's not I don't think there's ever really been a sense you had the the whack books, which were just enormous sense that I don't think there really was any let's go here type of place, I think you would have to go in and find a hodgepodge of stuff and try to take a whole bunch of examples and blog posts and sort of put them together and try to figure it out. So I know once this was put together that's to me has been that that first source to go to for everybody.
And then there are training courses you can take on cold fusion, there's like a fast track to cold fusion, I think is the name of one of them.
Over the last the last two years, Adobe's put together a few of those where they've had people put together some of those, and then the new certification course they're putting together that's start at the summit, right? Yes. So I, I'm going to and I know that what was it a couple years, couple years and maybe three years ago, where the Adobe cold fusion team tried to put together a quote unquote, college course that was about web development that yes, cold fusion is the back end. So they understand that we they need to get into places and I know there's a few colleges or, or whatnot that had had done some work with that those courses. So there is some stuff out there, but not nearly probably as much as we should have out there. For language. It's as simple as this to just get started.
And when I looked at that college curriculum, it seemed to be written for an older version of cold fusion, maybe I didn't have that, right. That's the thing. So
yeah, as we've learned, that's one of the hardest parts about writing a how to it's keeping a current.
I think a lot of these concepts came about with cF 11. I think that's probably around the time between cF 11. And 2016 is like when the Slack channel became a big deal, because the key really wanted to start to communicate with each other. And so I think there's been an emphasis more on learning and training and how to how to get that that revitalize in the community in the community again.
And then of course, there are conferences you can go to, to learn specific things. Once you've done this, I think you have a whole reference section in the course that says, you know, here are conferences, you can go to here, a user groups and all kinds of other things. So
and that's another reason why the site needs to be updated. Because when you have certain things in there with user groups or conferences that have either, unfortunately, gone away or gone on the hiatus for a while, we need to keep us updated.
And podcasts to come to mention it.
I don't know shocking about.
You used to run the CFO cost
200 200 plus episodes
strong. Yep. Wow. That's it, you should get a metal man.
It was many, many years. Working with
Scott stress enough is
all good things must come to an end.
Indeed. And then you've started your podcast here. And I know the artist team has started doing their podcast. And so people have taken up the torch for David Scott.
So any other things you're thinking for the future of Lindsay, if in a week, you mentioned a few things already. But
definitely, I think the one of the main things we kicked around a lot was adding, taking the sections, we've got an adding an advanced to each of them a little deeper into some just beyond the surface type things. That's one thing we're definitely going to look at doing. That's a little harder, because we don't want people to go through those in the initial run of the course because they will be outside of the scope of the course. But it's more of, hey, here's how to do like a query. But here's how to do something way more advanced. But it's not part of the course. It's more just a add on to teach you some other things.
Maybe it needs to be a bonus section ICF in a second week. I don't know what you call it.
Yeah, we thought about it like adding
does it keep track of what spits you've learned? And where you've, you know, do you like have a way you can check off? I've done that bit. So you can see what's left or Hurley
know if you're going through the course and creating the the app that helps you create or the Yeah, the app and I'll go through you know where you are based on that.
Make sense? Any other thoughts from anyone on what's coming into the future for learn CF in a week?
I think we've talked to a few different people like at somebody I talked to Charlie who Charlie Earhart, who is more than willing to review things or work with us on on resources sensitive, Charlie puts two or three resources on his website, hourly, I think. So work seems like that. Yes. Working with him and working with other committee members may be working with Adobe on on some things with it. Just over this last 45 minutes of talking, I'm sure some things with statistics and whatnot. Maybe we'll think about just so we can see how how it's going.
And I know at least at least I did. I don't know about you guys. But I submitted to Adobe about having a discussion about learn CF at CES on it.
It's a great idea.
So the like a roundtable discussion or what have you, as a session? Don't know,
maybe a meetup or Yeah, something session. Get them to put it on the keynote slide somewhere.
Because they did that a CF Summit East. So I don't see why they shouldn't do it again.
That's because I was part of it and I
anxious about that?
Well, sometimes you have to be persistent to get things to happen
versus and maybe I should use persistent as a better word for that.
Yes. So if anyone is listening here would wants to help out in some way, you know, how could they help, what they need to do is can I contact you or a duplicate of things you won't help with?
Once it's up, you just go to learn CF in a week, you'll know that it's the new sites, it's all looks like bootstrap.
But it doesn't look like good if it doesn't look like bootstrap is still the old system. And it'll look a whole lot different to look a lot more modern. When it's there. There'll be some information on how to get involved when people request to, to add things to the site to make fixes changes, so on and so forth. The site itself was written in coal box. So and that source will be available to so if somebody sees an error in the site, and they want to help out. They can help with that, too. Yeah.
And of course, telling their friends about learn, see if in a week would always be helpful.
Absolutely. Definitely sure what what other contact people on there like ourselves, if if we, if we choose to and talking to some of the
we're all going to be on there with the emails all go to Dan.
I love getting emails, they're there. They're great for all that I will forward my email box over to Dave so he can learn all about what's going on with my children.
So excited.
At a three hour time differences makes it even better.
I think we also have we have a Google group set up for those who are helping us with the the revision. And I think when we're all done, we're going to open up that Google group and probably link to it from the site. So that will be a another place where people can talk, ask questions, if they're running into trouble get help. Right. So I think it'll be a good a good channel for keeping track of suggestions and, and things like that as well. Definitely.
And hopefully, that's a great idea. Hopefully, we just do a better job as us three or as a community as a whole of, because it's going to be more open with it being in GitHub and and the Google Groups and other things, too. If we see the next version when the next version comes out. And we see something that should be updated, that people are more engaged and more involved with trying to help keep it up to date, instead of just leaving it to the original authors who, as we said, a bunch of them did move on into other fields from cold fusion or just didn't have time anymore to be a part of it. And so hopefully, it won't fall by the wayside anymore.
That's a great thing. And it's great that you've got multiple people working on it. So if someone gets busy or burnt out project keeps going. Now, you mentioned command box earlier, you have that in now in the install section of you considered whether you'd have anything about using containers and cold fusion, because that's pretty hot topic these days. And it
is, but that would probably fall more on the Advanced side. Yeah. However cool it is, it is cool. It's it creates another barrier of entry of teaching buddy what containers are and how to use them.
We Yeah, we did talk about the idea. Or maybe I brought that up originally when we were throwing about how to build this and put this together for somebody locally. And I thought about that. I think I'm we threw that idea around, I think I talked or maybe emailed some of the artists guys, because they had that containers. And it sounded like it was a little bit more trouble than it's worth. Or maybe as Carl that said, when they when he did one of the sessions that at at summit, and they tried to use containers, it did have some issues, terms of computers and operating systems and everything. So for for the site itself, that kind of kind of took it back took a backseat, but the idea of putting it into an advanced section. Now the idea of a saying a week to where we can talk about frameworks, for example, and how to put things together and then using containers and what command boxes and getting that kind of stuff out there. To give people an idea and not necessarily to use it. But to show them hey, here's her certain ways to be able to put it together.
Yeah, like you said, then like the the main course doesn't even go into using frameworks at all. Although I'm a huge advocate of using them, we don't talk about them at all on the basic course.
Maybe I think the idea of a separate advance. Cool. So have you put it together as a great idea. And maybe, maybe you could have something in the basic course that says, hey, here are some things you might come across if you're maintaining an app, and check out the advanced course if you want to learn about them. But I think it's your wise not to cram the basics course full of, you know, advice things.
Yeah. I mean, that
occurs to me, you've already got a sec. Yeah, it is. I noticed you have a section on security in there, which is cool. You know, maybe in the advanced thing, you could talk about the new performance manager or the API manager or deployment at the topics that come to mind there. And also, I don't know, where forge box would fit into this. But you know, I know artists is making a big push for people to contribute packages, and you reuse code. So and I think you had a section on reuse, don't you?
Yeah, yeah. And using CFC is of our goal.
I think if we had it in the if we do an advanced and we have a section on command box, I think that's that would be for Xbox would be a good discussion under that. Because that really the two things tie together so well.
Especially with just being able to use Command box to install package is from porch box with almost zero. Resistance. I mean, it's it's equivalent to how node MPM package manager works. But probably even a little better. So. But I think yeah, that that's not something that's really
No, it's not a beginner things. Yeah.
Yeah. So cool. Anything else you want to share about see if in a week before we go to the final set of questions on cold fusion?
I do want to say that with state of the CF union coming out which we've I think the whole committee thanks you for doing that every year. I know from for some of the sessions I put into for summit this year, I use that as a big key place to figure out places our community is lacking. And I think that that will help us when we talk about going doing it version of looking at that and say okay, what, why, where are places that we should talk about more about I know from from the surveys that you see a lot of people don't use frameworks or a lot of people don't know what dependency injection is. So being able to use the the community as a driver to help us with some of these things should also be very, very helpful for us.
Oh, source control, as someone blogged about in a somewhat Rachel way a few years ago. I'll leave him nameless.
I would like to take a second to thank a lot of the people that are involved in this, that ps3, there's a lot of people that are involved. For example, like, like see Nick Tunney? Who else, Paul Hastings, Tim Cunningham. I'm going to butcher his name goose who does that I pronounce that right.
Goose some
forget his last name.
Yeah, terrible names.
How when when the page loads on
it and I think it's a new in us but there you go. That I probably just slaughtered it. Apologies.
And then I who else Matt Gifford
we got Gifford out of the out of the out of the bells of somewhere to help us out.
We got Matt Clemente. One of the newer guys is come in. He redid a whole chapter. Masha. Am I blanking on her last name? Masha? Eden. Thank you. She, she came in and did a lot of reviewing of RMS and she's done multiple talks on that at summits. So
we even derived Dan Wilson back from native script land to help out.
That's true.
So yeah, it was a good mixture of the old and the new. And that's kind of the idea of going forward with a second version to get a lot of people, newer people that are out there. They're really doing stuff that we're seeing more coming out lately that that might really be passionate about helping out to,
and also my wife, oddly enough, my wife proofread the whole thing.
Man, my wife say my wife's an educator. So she helps us out by proofreading everything to make sure we know how to spell and use proper grammar. Because we're programmers and don't use the use that most of the time.
Guys Great. Well, it sounds like a really high quality way to learn cold fusion incredible price. So I suggest everyone listening, you know, check out learn, see if in a week.com you know, even if you already know confusion, like Carl was saying you may have learned some new stuff in there. You didn't know already or maybe you just want to share it. You know, social share about it with your friends or blog about it. Get help get the word out on this. So let's turn to questions. I asked all my guests, which is why you proud to use cold fusion?
Or should I borrow their tagline? And say because it makes easy things hard? Or easy? Or things easy? It makes?
I did I did this is a backwards you don't edit this out.
Makes hard things easy. Now that's their third tagline. They've had that since the dawn of time if I recall. Now for me it. I've had a great career so far. I'm being a coffee developer for well over 20 years now. I started back in cold fusion 1.5 which most people didn't even know existed.
Oh, good old DB ml.
Oh, yeah. Yep. Back when you had didn't have executable directories, and you had to do weird stuff to get go to run. So I've been doing for a very long time that a really good career out of it. And I love it, because like I said it using their their line, it makes the a lot of the heart is that I have to do on a day to day basis. A lot simpler. So I can focus more on solutions than how to write code.
But girl,
well, yeah, so in my, in my day to day job confusions about, I don't know, 25% or less of what I do on a daily basis, but it allows me to do what I do quickly. And effectively. None of the work that I do is, is visible from the public, it's all internal for the agency I work for. But it saves the products that I'm able to produce fairly quickly, save effort, save time, get information and people's hands quickly. And so from that perspective, cold fusion is just made, made that part of my job so much easier.
And for me, it pays the bills.
I didn't you know it, there's so many of us probably in the computer field that didn't start off in computers, when we were in college, or even before that and got into this. And it's it's been fun, it's been enjoyable. Being in the DC area, I get into a lot of government contracts. So I've seen a lot of good and a lot of bad in the government, not just what you see in the news, but helping, you know, building these sites that, you know, for example, the site that I work on now is a child welfare child adoption type of site for the government. And to know that that re Camden and his family, it's a place that they use a lot. So to be able to put a face and a name to your site. And knowing that it's helpful to people is always been something that's that I've enjoyed and being able to do it with cold fusion, which is simple and easy, because I didn't come from a computer background. So to be able to get up and running with it. It's been enjoyable. And now I get into with you guys, all of you get into these kind of things. And I work under some people that have a lot of intense pressure and a lot of advanced features. And I get crushed a lot. And I'm enjoying it because of that. So the basics are great learning the advanced stuff with cold fusion, because there's so much of it in there. And it has helped me personally to understand other languages. When I've looked at native script, I've looked at view or I've had to look at Angular or reading a Ruby at one of my jobs, I could understand what they were doing. Even if I didn't understand the syntax, per se, I could understand all this is a loop and here's what it's doing. And so a simple language like this is really a powerful, simple, the powerful language is really helped me understand a lot of my career.
Yeah, I think one of the keys, like several of you said is it makes hard things easy. And sometimes people look down on it, because it's like, oh, this is too easy. But really, it lets you do a lot of heavy lifting, and few lines of code. And, you know, if you're writing modern CF, like you're updating, learn CF in a week for, you know, this language can beat any other languages socks off, particularly if you're using command box and some of the other modern tools and techniques to do it. So I think one of the other thing that
it's like somebody said, once I this is this is old, too. And I know it's not current with all other languages currently. But I remember back in the day, somebody saying to send an email and cold fusion is one line of code, or in other languages, you have to install a module, you have to write all this, you have to write this, this this this, and then an hour later, you might be able to send an email.
Yeah, that's, I think still true to a great extent. That the other thing is, you know, I know, Adobe puts in a lot of effort into security. I was just talking to her as she was, you know, in charge of the development there. And, you know, I couldn't believe how much effort they go to make sure it's secure.
Yeah, I mean, I got knock on wood. It's been a long time since they've had a zero day.
Yeah, I think we've only had one in the last six years, whereas some other languages have had quite a few
whites a few. I think, I think he's had one on white the past 10 minutes, maybe.
I joke, but that one's probably paying more than any language for exploits.
And I'm not somebody who's been into a lot of other language. But you look at the the two I guess you could call the two main securities are is where we had Dave Adler before he moved on to envision and moved off of CF and then then Pete, free tag and all the stuff he's doing. I mean, these guys are making it so much easier for this language not to have have these these problems, because they're falling a lot follow the lockdown guides, followed lockdown guides. And if you saw it today, the fixing later webinar, which I'm sure will be out there for nobody to watch it was it's fascinating and to see the stuff that Pete's doing and the ideas that people gave him in the middle of the webinar was like, Oh, well, we should all think about that. I got nothing to do and this and this. So
while I'm waiting Nadir, as you probably know, is written in code, you should actually run server lists up on the cloud. So very modern architecture, or economical, amazing stuff. He gave a talk on that into the box was fascinating. So let's turn to what would it take to make cold fusion more alive this year?
More people use this course that we've spent a lot of time working on.
I second that, plus, I'd say getting another record number of people out at summit in Vegas, too, because I think they had a they had a very large crowd at Summit East, which is which is a positive I think every year it's gotten bigger. If we continue to grow summit, and it gets over 500 or more people,
I think every year summit West is run except for the one year one it was right after the event that happened in Vegas. Yeah, as I had a large amount of cash. But I think beyond that it's been a positive return every year.
And I think it's finding the right. For me personally, it's finding the right sessions for people such as I said, following CF union survey and said, finding places that are holes and a lot of the community to not to say for them to use it because I know we have a lot of old old old systems, but to understand it yet to see where it might benefit them. That will make the community more alive because they will start seeing the technology not just knowing that everything's in CF includes and, and custom tags. But there's other ways to do it. That'll make it more efficient.
A lot of times I think CF gets a bad rap because of bad coding not bad language. Yes. And if people take a step back and look at the code that was used to write quote, unquote, bad app, and they took some time to correct some of that I bet they're bad app would run considerably better.
But and more securely.
Yeah. But the short, quick thing is to blame the language instead, unfortunately,
yeah. How about you call? What would it take to make cold fusion more lives this year?
I think I agree with what what Dave and Dan said, I think, you know, as many people that come to summit, it's been I've been to every one so far is I always learned a whole lot of new things each year. It's a great community. And I think continuing to foster that community, get in, get on the slack team hang out in there, even if even if you're not doing programming today. Just hanging out in there, there's I learned so much just by osmosis, just by following the threads and the discussions. And everybody is eager to help each other out. So that's one of the great things I like about cold fusion and the community is that we're, it's it's not, it's inclusive, and it's very supportive. And so even even someone who's brand new, and it's okay that to pepper people with questions on this on the Slack channel, or, you know, use the forums, the nice thing about the forums is that they're theoretically there forever, whereas slack is sort of, you know, threads and discussions fall out over time, because it's a free, we're using the free tier back. But that real time interaction, even if you're in a remote worker, even if you are in an organization where maybe you're the only programmer look like where I work, I'm the only one doing cold fusion. But by staying in the in the in the slack team, I feel like I'm part of the greater community. And I always can talk to people, I can always throw questions out there and bounce ideas around. So I think that more the more people that get in there and stay in there and continue to be involved, the better.
And to dovetail on a little bit what Carl was saying there too, is
and try it don't if if you see something in like a forum or Slack, don't be afraid even if you're new to respond, you may have the answer somebody's looking for because you may have stumbled across that the day before that they had no idea about so don't you don't need to sit there and look at these forums or slightly said and and wait for a quote unquote expert or seasoned veteran to answer a question. If you feel you can have input answer, even if you don't be afraid to be give the wrong answer because it could spark conversation. Absolutely. I
we don't really have the as Carl said, the community is very open. We had our couple people that that are were not the best in terms of communicating what they meant, their their, their heart was in the right place, their wording was not quite the best. And some of that has has has been removed. So as you said, put the wrong answer up if you think that it's the right answer, because it'll actually help you. If somebody comes back says actually you all where there, it should be this and then you're learning to it. It's making you better, never afraid to be wrong.
Never be afraid to be wrong, because you'll learn more from being wrong and you will be from being right.
And along those lines. If you do go to a conference or you get on the Slack channel. Don't be afraid to communicate. Don't be afraid to walk up to a Dave Ferguson who you've seen on on post or Robbie, free tag or a Louie Spano or others Hi, and talk to him or you're sitting at a table at one of these conferences just open up and start talking. Because more often than not, you're going to find something common. Are you going to figure out Oh, that's that that person's got an interesting idea. Or they know somebody that I should go talk to the amount of times that the conferences that that's happened for me where I met new people, or I've been able to put people in touch with people, it's just a great thing to be able to do.
Yeah, I think I've learned more at conferences, especially CF summit, having Hallway Conversations versus sitting in sessions.
Not to say the sessions are great. Nah.
Don't take that the wrong way.
So Carl, you were gonna say something? I think earlier?
No, no, I think I think
whenever I was gonna say I think I want the other side has already brought up so I'm Oh, they read your mind.
So when when folks are at CF summit, is there any way they can recognize people on the Learn CF and a week to get t shirts? I think that's an excellent idea.
I got it. Maybe Adobe or foot the bill?
Whatever on VISTA print.
Hopefully by October, we will have the new site up and running. And the contributors page will be expanded. And there should be photos of hopefully more up to date photos of everybody. And then some of the others that are up there from back then are a little out of little out of date. But
less people want to keep the hair they had back then. I'm still
I'm still going with the old hair hair picture of me period.
So if it folks want to find you online, or how would they do that?
Oh, for me the best way just on Twitter. I'm on Twitter all the time. I have Twitter running all the time. And that's just add df grumpy on Twitter. I'm actually at df probably almost everywhere. If you find it. That's probably me.
Yeah. Go ahead, Carl.
No, yeah, I'm at CF Bonner, Vonn, er, and I'm using that handle pretty much everywhere. GitHub, slack and and Twitter.
I I am FM Dan. Oh 74 on Twitter. And if you find FM day I know out there. It's probably me.
What is the FM stand for I get the Dan Oh, but
embarrassing.
No, no, I I'm I was part of a running social drinking group called the hash house Harriers.
It's a worldwide organization.
So that's how many pints of beer you drank. 74 points when you
ran 74 was when I was born. So somebody already had FM, Dan Oh, on Twitter. So I had to come up with something else. and FM. Dan is sort of an acronym for a nickname that we had.
And we'll leave it at that.
There you go. And I think you run a user group too, don't you, Dan?
Yes, it's been a little bit dormant. But I'm starting to come up with some ideas here. I've had some people talk to me about it. You've mentioned speaking at it, I run the Northern Virginia cold fusion user group. We've literally when I've run, I ran it for five years before we sort of hit a little law, my wife went back to grad school. So got a little bit busy with the children. But thinking about getting things going again, I've got a couple ideas here. And a couple people have mentioned ideas as well. So hopefully I can get that back up. And going quickly with that is I always run it through Adobe Connect as well. So you don't have to to be present. I've had people from various places in the world be a part of it. DC traffic is so horrible that I know people live five miles away that can't make it to my office. So they'll sit at home, have their glass of scotch and enjoy a good presentation. So hopefully, we'll be back up and running.
And then of course, we also need to remind people that the website they need to check for learning cold fusion is learn CF in a week.com. So shortly to be updated and amazingly modern and wonderful.
Absolutely, hopefully.
Well, thanks so much for putting all this time and effort in you know, I know you don't get monetary reward, but I think you do get a lot of appreciation from the golf community. I know I'm appreciative of what you do for this. When companies get higher need hires, and they can find cold fusion people because we help them a little bit and that's that's a bonus for everybody.
Yep. Cool.
Well, thanks for coming on the show. No problem. Thanks for having Thanks for having us.
Yes, thanks for bringing us all on here. I know you'd mentioned it to me first, but I'm glad you were able to get the other two one because they've done it more than I have with this. So I want to make sure that they get the credit they deserve.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
How to start and run a CFUG (experts panel) with Daniel Garcia, Leon O'Daniel, Michaela Light and Nolan Erck- Transcript
078 Agile ColdFusion API Development (Amazing Postman, ColdBox and Agile secrets) with John Farrar – Transcript
091 Vue.JS FusionReactor and Therapy, with Raymond Camden- Transcript
084 Design Thinking for CFers (10 tips for better apps) with Dee Sadler- Transcript
031 Going Modular With Fw/1 Subsystems 2.0, with Steven Neiland- Transcript
Filed Under: Transcript
← Previous Post 093 Learn ColdFusion in a Week with Carl Von Stetten, Daniel Fredericks and Dave Ferguson
Next Post → 7 Steps To Get The Best Coldfusion Web Application Performance