How I got started in ColdFusion

Steve Bryant had the great idea of making August 1st "How I Got Started In ColdFusion" Day. He proposed that every blogger write a post about their beginnings in ColdFusion. This is my story.

In 97 I was a coordinator of secretarial services for the Archdiocese of Chicago's Office for Religious Education.

I got this position because I had streamlined a lot of the Office's process' by taking old Paradox tables and putting it into a normalized Access Database and then created a number of class registration databases that were all stored on 3.5 floppy discs. We did this to prepare for the office being put on an Network which is the real reason I was there.

I had a passing interest in programming and was reading QuickBasic, Visual Basic book and Java programming books as well as teaching myself C++ (because if you wanted to be a game programmer your really needed to control the stack), some friends knew of my interest and had a consulting company they ran. They gave me a call and asked me if I knew Access, I said yes, do you know ColdFusion, I said no. . .

"Do you know HTML?"

"Yes"

"Same thing."

University of Chicago had a position to convert some WebDB (later acquired by MicroSoft and made into asp) application to ColdFusion.

On day one I learned form posts (what does cgi mean?), on day 5 I had my first cfform completed. Yes it was written on Access and it likely wasn't the best app I ever wrote, I downloaded a trial of Cold Fusion Studio (originally I was working with Notepad and File manager) and was so blown away I convince UofC to get me a copy.

Four months later I started my first development job on a ColdFusion Intranet and support for a large technology re-seller.

I progressed and to survive learned a number a varying technologies but I always wonder why ColdFusion isn't the web server technology for any application that's being created. It gets too bad a rap from too many people just 'picking it up'.

It needs a bit of a boost.