How I Got Started In ColdFusion
As seems to be required now, here is my contribution to Steve Bryant’s How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day:
Having graduated from university in 1996 with a degree in Classics and – slightly more usefully – a reasonably popular Clint Eastwood fan site (”The Page With No Name”; I had a lot of spare time at uni…), I found myself an entry-level web monkey job at Future Publishing.
I started purely building the HTML pages; all the heavy lifting was done by a few techie guys, using Active Server Pages in VBScript (long before ASP .NET, so in what would now be called ASP Classic). We used various Microsoft technologies – anyone out there remember IE channels? (I think we may have been a launch partner for them…) Over the next few years I picked up bit of ASP here and there, and before long I was a techie guy myself.
It was decided that we should look at moving to a new platform; we sent an expeditionary group off to the BBC to see what they were doing with WebObjects – and in the meantime I took a look at ColdFusion 4.5 and liked it (in particular the fact that it was obviously designed for the Web – simple things like being able to do a database query without opening and closing connections; and even having a built-in function to format decimals!); I even (if memory serves correctly) wrote a review (positive!) of it for Internet.Works magazine. However, in the end we remained with the status quo, and by the time I left in 2000 no change had taken place – but I did have an installation CD for ColdFusion 4.5…
Soon afterwards I left and set up on my own (and have been freelance ever since), and started to learn what I could really achieve with ColdFusion – and haven’t looked back. I honestly don’t think I could have run my own Web freelancing single-handed for all this time if I didn’t have ColdFusion to back me up. I’ve never had any formal IT training, but like to think that, with the help of CF, I’ve become quite a proficient Web developer – and really enjoy throwing myself into all the new features that come along with each new release…
