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How I got started in ColdFusion |
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I thought Steve Bryant's idea of encouraging the ColdFusion community to write a blog article about how each of us got started with ColdFusion was genius. Here is a link back to Steve's blog. I'd recommend reading it and seeing just how many of us have chipped in with something.
The story of how I got started in ColdFusion is below....
My story begins long ago, during the primordial miasma of half a dozen fledgling development languages.... (Apologies, that's my last flight of fantasy).
I was originally hired by a fleet management company in the UK. They had just been bought by a larger American based fleet management company, so change was afoot. The I.T. department was the classic corporate I.T. model. Stifled creatively, driven by antiquated process and unable to respond to the business needs effectively.
So Marketing stepped in.
They started hiring developers to build the web applications they thought the company needed. I was hired as a trainee for a sixth month period. The existing technology was Perl and early ASP, but the American parent company threw ColdFusion 4.0 into the mix as they were already using in the states.
So I spent the first six months of my developer life learning Perl and ASP and converting it into ColdFusion, which was also entirely new to me. (I still look back fondly on the ColdFusion studio IDE, so lightweight and pure in its focus)
I ended out passing that probationary period and created a dozen front end company branded websites and a colossal intranet supporting over 2500 staff.
Over the space of four years we built a team of eighteen developers all coding ColdFusion, using either MS ACCESS or MSSQL back ends. The time came when the company was bought by a French bank and a system wide change was instigated. Everything was planned to be migrated to a shiny new language ASP.NET.
It was about then that I left to go contracting and then I really learnt what it was to become a developer.
Very good!