Bear with me, this is quite a narrative, but my start in ColdFusion was really the launching point for my career and adult-life, so if I’m going to tell the story, I’m going to tell it right.

Technology-wise, you could say I was a late bloomer. Not so much because I was late “taking” to technology, but rather, I was a bit late having access to, growing up in a family of very limited means. I really didn’t get my hands on computers until I was in my last couple of years of high school. But did I take off … Took a “computer science” class pretty much by accident, and discovered that the Turbo Pascal they were teaching was totally “me”. Had a TI-85 for a math class… I learned its TI-BASIC without any manuals or real examples. I bought a friend’s second-hand 286 and started banging out QBasic on it. No access to the Internet yet though ….

Then I went to college (Fall 1996) – a tiny little school in southeastern Oklahoma, but they did have the Internet (in labs, no dorm access at that point). Spent hours in those labs..first just killing time on the sites and chat rooms of the day, like everyone else. Then I discovered HTML and Geocities. I actually preferred writing my code by hand in what was nothing more than a giant <textarea> than using their “site creators”. As far as programming goes I didn’t do much .. a little JavaScript, but mostly of the copy and paste variety. I did actually take a C++ course my first semester, but I never went beyond that with my college computer courses.

Eventually I bought another computer – a 486. Windows 3.11, then NT4, then 95. Was still learning more and more web “development”, and then I discovered a neat little editor called Bradbury Homesite. I had tried others, but I was really impressed with the power it gave me with file management, toolbars with all sorts of tags, while maintaining simplicity as an editor. I noticed this tab labeled CFML .. I checked out the icons. Huh.. kinda looks like HTML, but adding them to my Geocities page didn’t do much, so I didn’t pay them much mind.

During this time I was truly sucked into the Internet, spending all hours online.. nothing like going to bed at 7:30 am when you have a 9:30 am class. As you imagine, grades nose-dived, and I found myself without financial aid. Loans and grants were how I went to school, so now I found myself stuck: no school, so no dorm, and I had to provide for myself (didn’t really have the kind of family I’d call for money or move back home to). Sooo.. I got a job. Or a few… after a couple of failed fast-food jobs, I took a job with a local computer store answering phones for their ISP help desk.

This was a little company, and their “Internet” department consisted of about four employees at the time. We did dial-up, web hosting, and web design. Our design platform? Front Page. Awwww yeahh… They let me do some server administration, and then some web design. Wanting to add a little bit of dynamic action to our sites, I learned a little ASP 2, building some pages with Access backends. Didn’t really go too far with that though….

A competing computer store/ISP was doing web design, using ColdFusion … apparently one of our programmers (the computer store started life as a programming company, with a separate group of 3 or 4 doing custom work, mostly in VB) who was an adjunct professor, caught wind of this. He recommended it, and so we bought it.

You know how it goes.. a bit of fuss is made, people get excited, but then they tend to focus back on the day-to-day and things kinda get pushed to the side. My manager spent a little time with it, learning a little bit.. we all looked up him as the programming expert. My immediate supervisor then built a few things, learning it.. and that was it. It sat on the shelf for a few weeks.

At that point, I made the decision, “Heck I want to learn this too….” So I took it totally upon myself. Installed it at work, and took the disks home, and installed it there. Included was ColdFusion 4.0, as well as CF Studio. I was blown away that Studio was Homesite with a bit more CF-specific features (Allaire bought Bradbury, and was later bought by Macromedia, who continued to sell Homesite through version 5.5.. some of its innovations made it into Dreamweaver and even CF Builder … some of its tag icons are found in CFEclipse!). I also had the manuals that came with it, which is how I learned, by working through what passed for tutorials and through just reading the language reference cover to cover (I hadn’t even heard of Ben Forta yet, haha…)

In short time, I became the CF expert. To be honest, what I was doing in those days would be embarrassing to look at now (I think that was the last time I used <cfupdate>! Also, no SQL Server or the like … all MS Access), but I knew more than the others in the department. Within a few months, I was gone, taking my first “real” programming job in January, 2000, right before the dot-com bust. I do look back at those days with a bit of fondness.. I don’t often get to grab onto new technologies and get to that magical place: the place where I’m fueled not by caffeine but by the fever of learning, in an almost trance-like state …