How I Got Started in ColdFusion

To help support Steve Bryant's proposed Aug 1 CF-themed holiday, I will throw my own story into the ring.

I was originally doing tech support for a CompuServe-related company in the Denver, CO area, and had already been passionately learning HTML in my own time, setting up and running a number of websites that were based on personal interests of mine. A local ISP advertised that they were hiring HTML developers, so I gave it a shot. I had no previous work experience in the web development industry so it was a pretty big gamble for them to go with me--but for some reason, they took a chance and took me in.

I had a number of small HTML projects on my plate, and they were being built in Microsoft FrontPage '97 (which I would go on to teach for a year at a local community college). I remember distinctly being frustrated when building out a site for a local school district and thinking, "My God, there has got to be another way to build a site where all the information is fed from some kind of central resource, instead of having to duplicate the same content over and over, page after page..."

At first, my attention turned to a new type of resource that FrontPage supported, a dark and mysterious type of file known as an ".ASP" file, but before I got too far into my research, a fellow colleague at the ISP (who ran his own internal network in his basement, and with whom I also happened to be hosting my Quake Gaming Clan's website with), said to me, "You know, if you want to build a site with a database back-end, you should really look into ColdFusion, we just got the 3.1 installer here".

I installed it, and began fiddling with setting up a search interface to an Access database I had been storing my MP3 collection in. Sure enough, it was some ridiculously short amount of time (10 minutes maybe?) which told me right then and there that ColdFusion was going to play a significant role in my career. I decided to pursue it, rather than go down the ASP route, arguing that given Microsoft's popularity (remember, this was 1997), there were going to be tons of ASP programmers--so ColdFusion would be my niche...

...and it still is today, 14 years later.