Andrew's ramblings

Blog about how I got started in ColdFusion

Tags: General, Coldfusion, ColdFusion 8, ColdFusion 9

In the early nineties I had just come back from overseas, working for a games company called Probe Software, and upon returning I was looking for a new direction in life. I had an itch in Computer Aided Art and Design at that stage, and looked for a course that would offer some formal training in this area. The course was more about Graphic Design than it was about CGI as we know it, however I did as much of the course as I could before the money ran out and deferred the course.

After getting a job in the Graphic Design and Print industry for a small while, I had the opportunity to get some exposure to database driven applications at that time, developing in perl and postgress or was it informix databases on a unix system. The job was actually a newly created position for me, as I wasn't and still don't consider myself a Graphic Designer at any stretch. And the role would have included a new project that the company was working on at the time, the project was also very new and nothing like it was even on the market at that time.

Needless to say that the funding sort of dried up, and so did the position within the company.

My next position was an interesting one, as it was a system administrator for an internet service provider, that not only had dial-in customers, but also designed websites for current and potential customers. It was a very challenging role as there was only me on the IT side, who had to deal with customer support, general administration of servers and equipment, but also having 3 graphic designers passing on work to be sliced into websites.

One of the applications that the company was working on at the time, was a forerunner to the ever popular car websites of today. The very first client I was dealing with at the time was a trader called City Ford who used to take photos of their stock and upload it into the system, and add the details of the car. This was originally being done in ASP at the time, about 3 days into the project I was handed a copy of Cold Fusion and yes this is how it used to be spelled, to evaluate for our company.

What had taken me a week to do in ASP, had taken me not quite a day to accomplish and showed the work that it had saved to the boss. Needless to say that this was the beginning of something that I will never regret going with, that and the seminars that Telstra and Firmware the distributors of the product in Australia, made me continue down that career path without any hesitation.

Since then I had moved onto other companies who did websites for Mount Hotham, Bulla and a few of the smaller Ski resorts here in Victoria, that also was ahead of their time with the introduction of web cams that allowed the visitors to the site to see the conditions of the snow. This company then began moving in a direction that was with bigger clients like Siemans and others to provide intranet solutions, which is the direction that I began focusing on more as time went on.

Having had no formal degree in programming, I had begun as a kid, to do some on the Vic-20 and Apple IIe at school, and began teaching myself along with my brother and a few mates, the joys of machine code and was truly fascinating to learn. The high level languages of today have certainly made our jobs overtime so much more enjoyable and easier, and I was certainly glad that ColdFusion has been a big part of it since the DBML days, to now the CFML ones.

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