About

Boring little programming dude – not much to see here. I’m just a nerd, so I’m going to talk about nerdy things here. Sure, there’s more to me than work, but this site is pretty much just the geeky stuff, so …

I’ve been working with ColdFusion since version 4.0 (about 1999) – but I love other platforms as well. Been working with ASP and PHP since about that time.

I love ColdFusion – not only have I worked with it since 1999, but I’ve served on the CFUG board in Dallas, and am currently a manager of the Houston CFUG. I speak frequently as user groups, and even some conferences (Dallas Tech Fest 2010 and 2011, Adobe MAX ColdFusion Unconference 2011).

I will always push ColdFusion solutions. Why? It’s cheap and fast (factor in cost of development before you consider license costs) and very full featured. Of course, I try to objectively see the value in other platforms, so I consider myself and “advocate”, not a “fanboi”. :-)

A bit of fun in the publishing world – I was a technical editor for some of Wrox Publishing’s books a few years ago – their only ColdFusion title, as well as some of the first .NET titles they released.

Plenty of Microsoft experience. Old school: VBScript in ASP and even in Word and Access. I actually built a silent auction solution for my church using Word, Access, and VBScript. Enterprise? No. Does it work for them? Absolutely!

These days I write plenty of C#. Not so much on the web – I prefer ColdFusion there – but C# is great when you already have an API, or need some heavy lifting.

Databases? Tons of SQL Server, since 7.0. Enough MySQL that I’m not a total newb. Even Oracle a time or two.

I’ll even use Access when it’s appropriate, and I’ve used it when it wasn’t appropriate (cut my teeth building Web apps that used Access as a data store.. yeah, I know ….)

I’m really excited by the new NoSQL options. I think there’s a temptation to force them into places where relational is still your best bet ….

I’ve worked on workflow systems (Windows WF, Process Maker) and message queues (Microsoft MSMQ, Amazon SQS)

I love the cloud. Not just servers in the cloud, but cloud platforms. Currently I used Amazon Elastic Beanstalk quite a bit, but I’m looking at Google App Engine a lot too ….