After a really long time, I spent some time this week on reading some of the blogs I used to read on a regular basis. And one thing I noticed is a series of “How I got started in ColdFusion” posts by most of the CFers. So here is my go at it :-
It was year 2000. I was a fresh graduate looking for a job. I read an advert in the newspaper for an ASP developer with a local company in Ludhiana (the city in India where I come from). I went in for the walk-in interview without any real hopes of getting selected. I was a total freshie with ASP, ColdFusion or any programming language for that matter. Turns out, they were not looking for an expert developer and what they were after is the willingness to learn new stuff which they somehow saw in me. Anyways, I got the job.
The first few days were spent literally installing IIS from the Windows CD’s and playing around with it and trying to get a Hello World ASP page up and running. All was rather going well, when suddenly, after a week of starting my job, my boss came around one day and said lets go to the bookstore and get a ColdFusion book. It was Allaire ColdFusion 4.0 if I remember correctly. So, we got the book and spent the next 3 days trying to install it properly, make it work with IIS and get a ColdFusion datasource working and connected successfully to a database. Those were really fun days. The good news was that the project I was working on was not a client Project. So the deadlines could be manipulated and since my boss was a keen learner of CF as well, he was not too worried about spending some time on learning CF on the go. I spent a lot of time on experts-exchange.com back in those days. Mostly asking questions. Very simple questions. This went on for a few months and before I knew, I was answering questions on experts-exchange.com and I believe it was that spirit of answering questions that made me learn CF as much as I think I did. I remember giving more priority to EE questions than my real work at one point. Funny but true.
Anyways, for me, that was how I started CF. Never looked back after that, really. Until recently though, when I have done some Enterprise Flex Projects as well, for the past 3 years or so. But it has mainly been ColdFusion for me throughout.
From what I remember Anuj that is what you did at Phones Int… having said that you did set up the very first external API with Vodafone in the country linking it to the Cold Fusion Vodafone online store which got reviewed by Ben Forta (CF Guru)… Impressive!
Hey Dan, great to hear from you. How have you been ? Well, thanks for stopping by. I’d like to beleive that when I was working at phones int , I was quite well versed with CF and was not really learning it, although learning is a never ending process, I was definitely not learning the basics. If you know what I mean. And I never knew the vodafone API I wrote was reviewed by Ben Forta. That is good news I assume, although not sure what his review was of the code.