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Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be looking at using content box in the cloud. And we're going to do some Docker magic with it. And I'm here with Gavin picking. And he is the software consultant for all the solutions. And he's also the guy behind a lot of the content box. Cool stuff. And I think he's been working away on a new release. But we'll ask him about that later in the episode. But first of all, we're going to talk about what content boxes and why you'd want to use it with Docker. And we'll talk about some of the cool new stuff that he's been putting out with the content box Docker image, and using a file mount in order to share media files between multiple instances and how clustering sessions can give you a lot more speed and reliability. We also touch on us support painter and couch based and Elastic Search. So lots of cool stuff in today's episode. So welcome, Gavin. Thank you appreciate having me. So for those people who don't know what is content box,
Gavin Pickin 1:02
so content box is order solutions, very own CMS. So it's a content management system. And we built it on top of CO box. So it's a whole box app and does a lot of the great things you expect from content management systems. And we try to make it bigger and better all the time. The beauty of it is, is that it's modular. And if you've used man box, forge box, and everything else, just like have a co box apps, you can install modules and extending your app, and seconds, you want it to us, you know, be crib free passwords or what not just install the modular if you want to use you know, any other modules, install them in a way you go. They're up and running. And you can use them in seconds. So it builds on top of all the great building blocks that call box and forge box and command box gives you
Michaela 1:50
great, so it's a cold fusion. CMS lets you have your users edit the content without you having to tweak with your code. But you can integrate in other pieces of code from your app into a in cold fusion. Yep. And the reason I love it so much is that even when I'm just thinking about building a normal app, maybe not a blog website or whatnot, that most people use content box or CMS service,
Gavin Pickin 2:14
you can basically build a content call box type of content box, use that for your user administration, your permissions roles, and then you just build a normal module. And then you can just use those roles. So instead of having to build a whole app, add your users build your roles, and permissions and all the evidence face everything before you can even start building your app, you just install content box, and you build your module because everything else is there. So I don't use anything except counterparts these days, even for the simplest of little apps that I write, I install content box and I build a module and that takes care of everything else for me,
Michaela 2:50
and and how expensive is content box if someone wanted to try it out? Oh, it's really expensive. It's free. So
Unknown 2:57
it's like you're free.
Gavin Pickin 2:59
Yeah, everything else that orders provides out there, we try and get as much open source software as we can obviously have professionally supported out open source software. So there are a couple of professional products, commercial grade products, but most of the stuff out there is free. And yeah, county boxes free, you can install it, try it out. And it's easy to get up and running in seconds. We have insulation on our website to download it, install it in the existing confusion server or instructions how to use it with command box or even if you want to spend it up and Dr. You can do that too. And they get up earning seconds for you. So you know, one line is how far away you are from running accountable site
Unknown 3:39
that is,
Michaela 3:43
but but first let's ask why would you even want to run it in the cloud using Docker?
Gavin Pickin 3:50
Well, the the more and more I do work with Docker and everything like that we know we've come a long way from
using VM and time but Dockers, just miles and miles bitter. And as we keep developing our our systems to like, we're just getting better designing software and doctors just, you know, Lisa here. And so going ahead with a V everything now it's like, it's really hard for me to think why would not use Docker. And that's sort of the more important question, you know, setting up an old school server these days, you know, sending up Linux just the way you want, setting up all your permissions that everything creating your sides. And then even when you install your cold fusion engine, installing, it's not easy may have a script for it. But then you're going to go through and look at every page and the admin and configure every single sitting and everything else. And we're doctor and the command box Docker image allows you to go in there and just configure everything on the fly. cf config is a great tool that allows you to export your settings. So maybe you know, Lucy or Adobe said that server setup that you like, you can explore those settings out, choose those ones you want. And then when you go to spend Docker and you say, hey, these are the settings I want. I want this time out. I want you know, this is my error page. These are my email server sittings, everything can be pre done for you, and spin it up in seconds. And guess what, if it dies, you spin it up somewhere else. If Digital Ocean goes down, you put it on Amazon, you know, all that information is inside Docker. It's extremely flexible. Move it wherever you want. And then it's easy to scale too. So I mean, doctors just great for so many things. Local Development or in production. I mean, we're using it for a lot of customers. And that's the majority of the time we spend these days is working on that. But we touch one of those old servers, man, it gives me a headache.
Michaela 5:37
So it sounds like a good thing to get your command box apps into the cloud using Docker. So let's just talk a little bit more about content box. So you You said you could an extended
Gavin Pickin 5:58
Sorry, just get up there for second. Yeah,
Michaela 6:01
you can extend content box using modules. Is that Gavin or no
Gavin Pickin 6:08
with us, you know, we use interception points and co box. So just like jQuery where you had like a click handler on this, basically, whenever you have those events, fire jQuery would listen for and do something and call box supports that too. So when you're logging in, for example, say you're going to go on to your login page of your site, and someone forgot their password, right? So they click forgot password and says, Hey, putting your email address, and we'll email you What if you don't like that? Maybe you want to add security questions. And so for one of our clients recently, they said, We don't want to have to have them email their their password or Reset Password link. We want to be able to have them on system security questions and do that. So what we did is we just had an Inception point, which is on should go show Forgot Password. And then what it does is it says, Hey, I want to inject a little piece of code right here. And it shows me a link to go to security questions. So now when you go to their site, and you click forgot, password has a button that says, you know, reset password using security questions, you click that it opens up a module, which shows their security questions, they fill them out, they answer it. And all that's done without touching content boxes. Core code, you'd have to go in and change the content box login page, you just write a bit of code, this is Hey, when the on log and boxes shown, put this bit of code on there, and it does it for you. So interception points make it easy to extend. And like I said, you can even extend the the objects as well. So you can use CFC inheritance to where you extend same. We call the the users and content box authors because their authors of content. So if you want to, you can just basically go in there and just extend an author and add more security or add something else. So maybe you want to have it where when you give permissions to uses, you want to say, hey, I want them to be an administrator, but they can't delete people. So what you can do is actually have a bit of code that runs and you extend the author, and you say, when you check permissions, instead of using content box, checked permissions, use my check permissions. And then my check mission says, Hey, is given a lot of delete this user? No, he's not. And then if I try and do something else to say, is Gavin allowed to do this? Yes, he is. Okay. And let me check county boxes now. So what you did to us rap content boxes, project relations with your own and you can do what you want. And of course, you can add modules to the admin, admin news and everything in the admin, you can add modules to the front of the site, whatever you want. It's just a pro boxer. But
Michaela 8:37
you have the option to tie into content box for what you need. So now, if you've done all these kind of customizations, and, you know, have modules and you release a new version of content box box, does that break all those customizations?
Gavin Pickin 8:56
Unless we really mess things up? No, it shouldn't. That's the video that those Inception points won't disappear, you know, those, those Inception points will still exist. So that'll still work. Unless we change the author, you know, functionality or something,
then it should all work. So usually with these type of extensions, there's no issue at all. And actually, that leads me to another point, there are a couple issues that we had some things with content box is way we stored themes and modules and widgets previously, and the old school way of doing things you would install, you know, your download a zip from, from the website and unzip it. And then you put everything inside your, your code. And so inside the content box module, we will have our things and I'm all chosen a widgets. Now if you're using C'mon box, and you want to upgrade your content box server, you just do install otter box dash dash force, and basically, okay, override that module. But now your things and your widgets and everything they were in there, they might get knocked out. So and content box 3.8, the new version we're about to release any day. Now, hopefully, any day. Now, the time you listen to this, it should be out has a new convention for custom content box content. So you'll have a new place to put your things in your modules and your widgets and everything, which is basically upgrade proof. So when you go and upgrade your your site either have to worry about is that kind of affected my themes, or why not present modules completely removed. And that made it smoother for the Docker installs, and everything else. So just like everything else, we do our day to day work for our clients help us improve these products. And so we've improved my inbox and content box. And this is something we're doing for those purposes. Is there so
Michaela 10:40
update? Yeah, upgrade proof. Yeah, what what other things are exciting about version 3.8 that's coming out
Gavin Pickin 10:49
that a lot of little stuff to do with, you know, just small bug fixes that people have found and everything else. But the big thing really is just making content box more flexible to allow likes edition of themes and different locations in widgets. And really making it you know, I say, sort of install friendly, Docker friendly, and just give you a central location for all your content. And, you know, as a developer, it wasn't fun sometimes for me to go into modules and content box, and then look for the themes under that location. Now, everything's at a higher level. So it's just easy to click into, and get to all my stuff is easily contain too. So, you know, I can just copy that folder into another content box site, you know, if I want to just copy a theme, it's easy just to grab it and move it just higher up in the tree. But most of the stuff is all about just a little fixes like that. And a lot of lot of changes to do of making it more doctor friendly. As we go, you know, said, we're using it more and more, and we come up these little issue. So we work through them. And when we release, it will have the release notes which have, you know, all the little bug fixes and improvements we've made. So, gotta get ahold of that. But those are the big things really, it's just, you know, it's not a not a foreigner released yet. So if you guys are waiting for 4.0, maybe you'll see that into the box coming up here at the end of April, maybe not. You'll have to come and find out so
Unknown 12:11
and things for that. Oh, okay.
Michaela 12:14
Yeah, so there's some exciting new stuff for version four that's coming out in a few months time.
Gavin Pickin 12:20
Yep, that's on the road roadmap right now, we're hoping to get a few more big items. And we've talked about them over time. But we're saying real busy with in order solutions is doing a lot of client work, a lot of legacy conversion, a lot of people converting older blogs of content box, a lot of things, moving people into doctrine, the cloud, that's what we're doing a lot of these days. And that's why this topic is so important. Because, you know, I spend a couple hours on slack most days talking to people about different options on you know, how to deploy your servers, and how you should deal with file mounts, and this and that. So, you know, this this be a nice little session, I think, and probably come away with more questions and answers for, but that's okay, we're, we're on Slack, we're on the CFL select group of artists, like you're, you know, available through Google Groups and everything else. But I think it's just, you know, big step forward. So,
Michaela 13:12
yeah, we talked about the roadmap in an episode last year. So I'll I'll link in that for people interested in what the roadmap is. Yeah,
Gavin Pickin 13:22
a lot of it comes down to making it more API friendly. There's some built in APIs and content box, which make it easy to get into data. So if you hit, you know, certain URLs and content parts, you can get all the page data back for page or the category list or, or whatnot. So we're making it more friendly, where there's, you know, going to be
API tokens for users, so you can actually hit the API and be secured that way we know that you're actually legitimate user trying to access the site so it can secure it someone and then we're looking at custom content types where you can build your own crowd interface based on your content types. So there's lots of little things like that I'm not sure what's going to make the cut version four but we've got lots of good ideas probably through the version five six and seven but we know we keep adding them and as we get to client that needs something and we're like okay, let's time to build this module and so we're doing that all the time so as we develop them out and get them tested and we put them in there
Michaela 14:19
so you you made a new image for content box to load in Dhaka Tell us about that. And what's special about it, yeah,
Gavin Pickin 14:30
I want to take credit for it completely. Because, um, you know, john and bread do a lot more of that john Carlson and bread would spend a lot of time working in Docker images and command box stuff. But they took the command box image, which is basically a vanilla image that allows you to run any JAR file, any version of cold fusion, Lucy Rayleigh and get it up and running, and Docker. But with content box, as I mentioned before, we have all those customer locations for the themes and widgets and modules and everything else. So if you want map those in, you know,
so you can have them fall mounted, so they persist across different engines, and you can share them between nodes, then, you know, those are very important. So they added support for that we had a lot more environment support as well. So if you wanted to, you know, pass in certain environment variables into the Docker image, it'll support that as well. So you can actually pass and sitting. So if you want to override the settling for this image, to maybe use a different file location for the media mount versus the built in one on the database, you can pass it on the fly settings and everything. So it's got a few extra goodies like that, and we'll find out more during the session. But, you know, it's been upgraded to be content box specific where C'mon, boxes, images, really, you know, for any CFL app, or even just any jar, you can deploy our jaws through it to, you could do you know, to the point Jenkins and one on top of her matte box, too. So
Michaela 15:58
you mentioned files mounts there, why would you want to use that in in a content box out?
Gavin Pickin 16:04
Well, obviously, with content box, it's a CMS, and people going to be uploading blog posts, they're going to have photos and images, and maybe a photo gallery or whatnot, slides for the slideshow on the homepage. And so you need somewhere to put those. And now we're Docker the way you have to think about. And this is a big change with doctors that instead of having one site, one folder that lives on forever, you've basically got your blueprint for how the site should work. And then you've got other pieces that means to live on. So you've got the data in the database. And then we got some files, which will live in a media store that we call it the contents like the media manager, and part of fantasy box, and those sort of two things live on. So if you killed your site, and spin it up on a new server, you'll basically link up the database to gain an England link up there folder again. And so if you have it on four different nodes, for example, for different items in the cluster, the blueprint would be on all four. And then they would point to this one database, and it would point to one file now that allows you to share those images across all the images, all them and that way, if some, one of the Docker nodes explodes, like doctors should be able to, if it blows up, you have three others, and it still keeps working on the old way, if you had it in your file system you uploaded into your site, and the server went down, you'd lose those files. And, and clustering them was kind of a pain and everything else. So you will have to think about that was your app, you know, not just 20 bucks, apps, whatever apps, you needed some central location for things to make it easy to to keep those files alive. But farmlands and Dr. Make it easy to share them between, you know, multiple
instances. and away you go.
Michaela 17:47
And then how do you if that's a single file mountainous share between all instances in the cluster? How do you protect that from the file mount? having issues, keep you back get out? Or what's the Yeah,
Gavin Pickin 18:02
I mean, obviously, always backup everything, you don't usually have to backup your your sites these days, because of their just blueprints. You just download from your source control. And, you know, do a box install MPM install, and away you go again. But But yeah, from most things like that have a good backup. And then usually you have snapshots, you could replace them with a snapshot of it. So floating eye peas, and everything is good for your service. But the good thing with volume mounts things like Digital Ocean, you just spin up in your mouth, restore the backup and away you go. And those are usually you know, if you're using something like Digital Ocean, or Amazon, AWS, etc, those are usually super, you know, reliable there, they do go down but you know, their fault tolerant region, you know, you can set it up to however you want to, it can be stored in multiple regions, etc. So they're they're built to work that way. They're built like yourself DNA so you won't have this the same issues like said it's possible things can happen. Amazon went down for whatever it was it for hours, that one day in the world, it
usually they're fine. So there's far mounts are going to be way more secure, way more resilient than your what you're used to. So okay, so why would you want to cluster your content box sign? What's the benefit of doing that? Well, the big thing with Docker is, first of all, you're isolating this one site from other sites. So that's a big thing before you even cluster just having a sound bar, for instance, means that if you've got a big beast of a site that all of a sudden, you know, decides to update 300,000 records at once, that is not going to take down your site to, you know, the hardware and everything is all virtually separate through the VM through Docker. And so everything there is going to be separate and protected. But then once you've done that, and you have a protected from ever instances, you can spin up more than one to save yourself some some some battles, basically. So just like you would in the old days of clustering a server so you know, if one is busy, you've got another server allows you to horizontally scale instead of just getting a vertical scale where basically you add more CPUs and more RAM to it with clustering, you just give it more servers and say, hey, these are this is where my swarm is. And the beauty of adopted swarm as Docker swarm says, Hey, they want want want to view my website? Which one should I send it to? And it figures out, oh, we've got three up right now, I'll send it to those three. And then if you're in a busy time of the year or something, you could spin up a few more. I know some people have maybe five sites on their really busy times. And when they hit the super p, they have update from five to 15 or 20 instances on their service. And they can just do that by you know, just spinning out more and office one knows where it's going. And it handles that so and
Michaela 21:02
and either you could do that you can either do that manually or you could automate the scaling based on the traffic Yeah,
Gavin Pickin 21:11
things like Cuban aliens have built in auto scaling based on on different settings. Docker swarm didn't have that last I looked, I know they're always announcing new features. And I'm sure that's coming soon. But right now with Docker swarm, you have to tell it winter up it basically. So you can get an alert saying, hey, I've got so much traffic from instances and they could give you a notification and you could just run a job. This is a spinning up to more or whatnot. But yeah, as of yet, Docker swarm doesn't auto scale,
but it is. It is a nice thing. That's one of the main reasons people like things like Cooper, Nettie switches, another option for orchestration. If you're not using Docker swarm,
Michaela 21:52
well, I, you know, maybe poor Taina will add that in the future, you know, yeah,
Gavin Pickin 21:58
potatoes, a great tool, we use it all the time, I'll be using my presentation as well, showing you how that works. Because they're really nice UI to those who are not comfortable command line is Dr. You can get all the information you need from the command line. But it's nice, better pull up or Tina and look at your instances, see what's where they're spread out. Maybe you've got, you know, three, three little CF apps running on one server and to one another, you can see that visually, you can click on to them to see what environment variables are using, and whatnot, it's it's a great little tool, we use it at orders, I recommend using it even on your local day of just to see what's running on your machine when you're getting started. It's it's really invaluable. Man, it's open source. And we're lucky to have a relationship with for Tina, where we've talked to the people, the other great guys and they're adding more support for thing is we go through and they seem like they're, you know, good people going the right way. So we definitely want to, you know, help support them. And where we've been talking them about doing presentations, or just developer week. Last year, I thought we had some from 14 to come and speak. And, you know, those are valuable, valuable sessions. And we're trying to do more with them reaching out to other open source companies as well.
Michaela 23:12
That's great. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to well, the co founder Neil Creswell of 14 hours on a podcast and I'll link in his interview in the show notes. Okay. Um, but lots of exciting new features there. And I was just amazed. I mean, I think he said, there are 250 million downloads the poor Taner. So that's a lot of websites being run through darker or using poor Taner and
I don't know how many of those those 250 million are running content box, but probably a few,
Gavin Pickin 23:44
a few. But, uh, I mean, it's great software. So I'll definitely show everyone how to use that and run it. And I mean, it's, it's definitely great for working through things. So
Michaela 23:54
now, you you mentioned, you know, the, the file mount, what about that database is the anything you can do there to improve performance? So,
Gavin Pickin 24:06
yeah, I mean, you're always gonna have a bottleneck somewhere, one way or the other, you're going to find a bottleneck if you're working off somewhere like AWS, or Google Cloud Platform, you know, using their database solutions, just like the file mounts and everything. They're set up to be resilient, they're set up to be scaled, they're set up to be, you know, ideal if you're running your own. Obviously, databases, we don't recommend running in Docker right now. It's the preconceived notion that it's better to have their own, you know, dedicated
VM, basically. So, but yeah, I mean, you can look at clustering them, and depending which database server you're running, you can definitely do that. We have clients running on AWS, and they're using their, the AWS RDS stuff, and they're loving it, it's working great. And we have some customers that are using AWS as database across the cloud to their stuff, which I was surprised work so quick. So I guess AWS and some pretty low latency and they're able to do that. But But yeah, I mean, you can different look at clustering, you know,
but again, with these days, with the quickness that you can spin up a new server, you can go to Digital Ocean, spin up a server restore from backup, melt, your drive, and your floating IP, and it's back up and seconds. It's crazy how fast everything is these days. So you know, those, those file mounts store your data, the floating IP, obviously, is how you move your IP. So the database server goes bad use that but spin up a new one at the farmer at the IP in a way to go. It's It's kind of crazy, but the world we live in. But yeah, if you're a somewhere with the database options like Google Cloud, AWS, that's the better way to go. So they're built to be clustered automatically. They're behind the scenes the cluster, they're horizontally and vertically scaled, you know, they're there just perfect. Perfect. Well, we just don't all live in that world. So
Michaela 26:05
what about caching? How does that work with content box? Yeah, well,
Gavin Pickin 26:12
that's the big thing with other than your media is your session. So obviously, you could run content box, multiple servers, and that'll work fine. But your stations, you need some way to link their sessions together. So when someone hits one box or the other, it doesn't actually, you know, love them out, because, oh, you don't have a session on the server and do something about that. So we use couch base or readiness for that read us we have a nice little script that you could spin up a server on the fly and Dr. But couch base is a the caching engine that we used most the time, we have extinctions for Lucy to have rightists and couch base needled natively supported and Lucy with the couch base extension and they are two of our commercial products but they were great that allows us to basically you know use I'll use that cash for our session storage so across you know across servers instances it up things is one big hunter box so you can have 1020 content box instances depending upon as Docker swarm and it all things is one big gap. So they weren't great for that they're lightning quick read us is really popular. And it's, you know, great in memory cache, and it's perfect for this.
Michaela 27:30
Well, what about three texts? Because often people have all kinds of content and they want to be able to search for it. Does it support that or? Well, I
Gavin Pickin 27:40
mean, usually for that we've been working with Elasticsearch and behind Elasticsearch is loosing engine and that's been running this stuff and Steve search for quite a while now. That's an Lucy they use that behind the scenes for CF search. And before solar loosing was inside the WC f as well. So I found out today I've been using the scene and the engine behind Elasticsearch for quite a while just didn't know it. But But yeah, Elastic Search is a way we're looking for anything like that. We've got some pretty big traffic travel sites. And right now it's a everyone's getting their money from Texas back unless you're a freelancer. And everyone's you know, planning their summer vacations and spending a lot of money on on travel. And we're working with a couple of travel agent right now. And these big companies, they have a lot of traffic. And their searches have to be lightning quick. If you're not putting enough someone will go elsewhere. And so we're using Elasticsearch to power that and it's it's lightning fast. And so Elasticsearch is great for that. And again, you just put up a container to inside Dr. You know, you have all your index data and everything and use JSON query and comes back and JSON lightning fast and you can plug it into your home fusion or your JavaScript front end, and away you go. So,
Michaela 28:59
so on on some of these high traffic sites that are running through content box, how many Docker containers Do you have to have to support that volume of traffic? Well,
Gavin Pickin 29:12
I mean, it really depends. I mean, right now, for most of our sites, even for some of our clients, we're running, you know, 234, I mean, you probably could run more, but we have a decent size, you know, Docker instance for them, we usually run Lucy with, you know, two or four gates around. And that way, they've got plenty of juice. And, you know, usually that's enough. But like I said, if something happens, and they need more, they can just throw a couple more of it. And, you know, that's, that's the beauty of Docker, right? So if you got three services today, need 10 tomorrow, you can do that. So and you don't have to install or service and set up the configuration of yours copying the scripts that you did for the first service. And it's up in a few seconds. Yeah, I mean, basically, we use continuous integration for everything. So when you push your code development branch, we're using get lab a lot because of the built in Docker supporting the built in Docker registry, it's really slick. So yeah, there's build scripts are running is going to go and take the take your files, it's going to pull them down. It's going to run your build script, your Docker files, and we, you know, we do implement stores and run any Gulp functions we need or anything like that. And they see once it's all down, we run our tests, make sure it has passed. Once that's done in the past. Then we wrap it up into a Docker image, then we upload it to the Docker registry, or behind the scenes. And then basically, from there, we push that out to our Docker swarm, we can push it out to the staging swarm and make sure everything's working fine. And everything. And once they're happy with that, and they can push a button to emerge from Dave to staging. I mean, they have to production sorry. And once it's in there, that master branch, it does a build without all the testing because you've already tested it does all that building and everything and then push it out to the swarm. And then Docker swarm was smart enough to spin up the new one, it's been one, you end up spending another new one up, and then it starts taking down the old ones. And that way, you're slowly you know, switching them out, there's no big you know, Holt and there's no, you know, 1010 minutes of taking all your Lucy's down while you you know, when you upgrade your code and run all your stuff, and then started up again, it's, it's all behind the scenes and seamless it's, it's just like I said, I can't believe how much harder was when I read those legacy servers. Now I get a headache, you know, so, I mean, yeah, I mean,
Michaela 31:34
yeah, and that's not just for code changes. I mean, if you wanted to upgrade to a new version of Lucy, or any other config change you the same kind of process can be applied. Yeah, exactly.
Gavin Pickin 31:45
That's the beauty or based off like, Man box server, you just change your boxer. Jason, you know, your server that Jason and so you go to the service Jason and say, hey, I want Lucy 5.2 point six right now. And you're like, Oh, you know what, there's a new version version of
this module. And so maybe I want to use, you know, version 1.2 instead of 1.1, you could change your box, Jason, you push the bus. So Jason through your source control, and then it'll start to build persists, and it'll taste it, make sure it all worked. If something breaks, it's going to tell you, hey, that modules not working,
it doesn't get pushed out, you tell us your report that have failed and you can go and, you know, take care of it. So, I mean, and the thing is, you don't worry about installing that that module and you know, and then pushing that module into source control with command box and forge box, just just a version number. And then when you go to install it, that's when all the work happens. So you know, having to worry about you know, big chunks of code and your source control is just what you need in your source control. So
Unknown 32:48
Well,
Michaela 32:50
yeah, so I'm this content box with Docker is very exciting. And all the other box things make it really easy to to scale and have a reliable content site. So great stuff you're doing there. gammon.
So let's talk a bit about some other topics now, if that's okay, yeah, sure. Which is, the first one is why are you Why are you proud to use cold fusion?
Gavin Pickin 33:19
I've been using cold fusion a long time. I did actually use ASP and PHP for a while, just while I was at college, I got you know, there was some classes at school as I was doing Java and Pascal and turbo Pascal. And, you know, ASP. net or Yeah, yes, classic ASP. They call it now was around and PHP was as well. And I got the chance to work for the University of Auckland. And we're basically formed the first a business team and lm managers went to this big cold fusion training. And they came back with these big old manuals, the three day boot camp, or why they mean the five day they came back, sit, this is amazing, we're going to use it, they threw the binder on the desk and said, go learn a guys. So that weekend, I went home and came back and I was already writing I wrote my first little module, right, and, you know, use module did the credit for it, listed it, you know, did did all that work, and was easy after working with PHP. And ASP is like, that was just such a blessing. So easy. So quick, you know, everything just made sense. You know, there was actual error messages that I could see and use to fix things and like PHP, white age of nothing. And so it was just, it was great. And then from there now been working with the ever since worked for, you know, a few companies before I came to the office and, you know, done a lot of great things for a lot of great companies. And, yeah, I love it. I mean, there's other languages out there that might have some nice features, but you know, it cold fusion does everything I wanted to do i do it well, I'm a lot of great people with it. And, you know, it's still the job for people. It's, you know, now of Lucy to have the open source option. It's way more as an option for people as you know, budgets coming more into play, and Docker and Docker licensing, I mean, it's got a lot of great things going for it. And I mean, I love showing it off. I love showing off like, command box to people. Because that type of stuff, like the ability to write your own COI commands, and everything is pretty cool. And I don't know too many other languages, they can do that. So I like to show it off and see if people even gets what language is written. So
Michaela 35:32
that is so cool. So I, you know, we're here is to live podcast, we're working on making cold fusion more alive. And I'm, you know, letting people know, it's a modern language, which is what you guys what is all doing with content box and all the other box products. But my question for you is, what would it take to make cold fusion even more alive this year?
Gavin Pickin 35:57
That's a tough question. I mean, really, for language just to get popular, we really needs some killer apps, you know, like PHP has been around forever. But nobody really gave a until WordPress came out, you know, I mean, a lot of these big languages or whatnot, they get their attention, it's because there's a big app that everyone's using, or there's a big site that everyone knows about, they think is awesome, that's using it, you know, so I know, Twitter was using, you know, certain language at certain times. And when they change languages that they got a bad rap for, for using them, you know, but it's, it's certain technologies at certain cool hip companies get that make them look cool. I mean, there's no one that's out there, using, you know, cold fusion for a big company, or, you know, there's no one out there with that killer app, like WordPress or whatnot, that's taking the world by storm. And that's why no one knows about it. So that's really the big challenge, I think, is if we could get some big company or whatnot to be using it, and people know that they using it, but I mean, that's, that's not an easy to do. But that's what I think it would really take to really make it like, get back on the scene as I hey, this is hip and cool. We're using command box package management. Because when I tell people that we have package management and see allies, and and all of that people really like, yeah, we have scripts, and we can do this when you do that. And I, like you have member of functions to and I know that Brad and then when they go to give the dev Nexus and the token Java developers, Java developers and blown away by all the stuff that we can do that they just can't do. They gotta do boilerplate and everything. So it's just, you know, it's all about getting the word out there. And without that killer app, whether killer site using it, I think, you know, it's always going to be an uphill battle.
Michaela 37:44
So you're going to enter the box. And I think you'll be making several times into the box four times are you doing a workshop and you're part of the keynotes and you're doing two sessions yourself?
Gavin Pickin 37:58
Yep, I'm definitely busy Yeah, we're doing the workshop called boxes zero to hero and we've actually sold out that workshop so that's the first workshop this year to be sold out me and Eric Peterson going to be presenting on that one so that's great yeah, I will be speaking at the keynote as well talking about punted box and some of the ever ever items that I work on that water solutions. And then I have two sessions. One of them is called the box and Dr. which have been talking about today. But I'm also speaking about Alexa with CO box REST APIs too. So I think that it's an interesting topic is something fun for us geeky cold fusion is out there to play with. And now I want to show people that you can play with Alexa and you know, usually call box REST API and be able to do some cool stuff with that. So that's something every session is on. So I've been working on that recently. Just trying to get it all polished up to to try and while you guys and show you some cool stuff
Michaela 38:58
sounds exciting. So what are you looking forward to this year's into the box gammon? Well
Gavin Pickin 39:03
I got a lot of friends that will be there obviously the oldest teams were like a family it's a great little team that we have and you know I always enjoy time with the team but there's a lot of great people that have made this conference and a lot of other conferences to another there's a first time speaker into the box Jeff Jeff uncle I think you interviewed them already and he's made him a CF objective and the objective last couple years is a really good guy and we're happy to have him come speak there but there's a lot of other great people that with me over the years at different conferences and that will be there so I'm really looking forward to to meeting some of them there especially some of the speakers you know I've got to know over time as well so that's usually the best thing is just really catching up everybody you know friends new and old but that's that's a big thing for me obviously is always great content it's always inspiring you know you get get really passionate everything you come back wanting to do more bigger better things but you know comes down to it the the people people's what make these conferences worth going to you know
Michaela 40:12
yeah i mean i was there last year it was a great event very friendly lots of great technical content and lots of cool conversations in the corridor as well yeah it's one of the mariachi band as well
Gavin Pickin 40:25
yeah happy box is always a highlight it's it's a lot of great fun but uh. Yeah, that's what I like about into the box I mean it's not a big conference
but a couple of people that came there last year they're really surprised because you know they they were amazed how intimate it was you know like we've got enough people that it's a good popular conference but not too many where this you know you sort of see people flying by never have time to talk so it's one of those conferences that you know you run into people you know a few times is always time to talk to everybody you want to talk to and you know obviously I'm an old this guy but a lot of people said it was great that they could sit down and talk to each of us and pick our brains about different things and you know give us their two cents on what we should do and shouldn't do and you know it's good to be have that sort of intimacy and so I know a few people last year talked about it being one of the best coffees unconscious have ever been to you know and Jim Pickering has been saying some great things on Twitter about us lately and all energy speaking it into the box this year he he was said yeah it's it's confusing Congress have been to a long time and he's been through a lot of conferences he speaks CF summit at sea of objective and and some other non professional conferences to and I mean, he really enjoyed it. I mean, I I think it's a real step up and I said, it's just the right size, I think a good amount of content and I say great people, you know, we got a lot of people PO Box and non box doesn't have to be a box person to enjoy into the box to there's a lot of great stuff there that you'll get out of it without having to be a box fanboy.
Michaela 42:02
Yeah. It's not just box stuff. There's plenty of cold fusion topics and other developer topics. So you know, I was talking with Jeffrey just before I interviewed you and he's talking about dealing with anxiety in development. And you know, that's the thing that a lot of confusion developers have stress and imposter syndrome and various other things so
Gavin Pickin 42:28
yeah, but it's important to have looked after all aspects of us I mean not to sell coding mind but yep the soft skills and dealing with yeah a lot of the other aspects is very important and I'm interested in that topic too. So definitely good to see cool so what are the confusion conferences the speaking out this year well, I'm hoping to be speaking at CF summit again, if they pick me the speaker deadline is coming up here. I think April 15 is the the deadline for CSI
one and Vegas this year it's going to be in October a little earlier than last year. But I spoke there the last few years and it's been it's been a lot of fun so I'm going to be there I was hoping to get to see if objective again this year have spoke the last five years have been in the last six years but they're on hiatus this year. So I'm hoping that a lot of the guys that we usually run into it safe objective or make the trip down to Texas and join us into the box and see if objective is not going to be happening this year
I am going to be going to Europe and I think at this point if my schedule stays the way it is they're up in sacramento california and then early April so I'm actually helping me get up there and you know obviously mirror has competed at a content box I'm not just going there to steal ideas and everything else but to see you know what they're doing and they have a lot of client projects to and see what companies are doing with and everything it's just good to keep up with with everything going on there and so that's happening I've never been to Europe on some kind of excited about that another one that I've never been to NC DEF CON I'm hoping to get out to to do this year just waiting on those dates to see if they're going to have the same time frame in September
and then obviously CF camp in Europe would be beautiful I'd love to get there so if I can make it work with my wife then we'll try and take a little trip to Italy afterwards and everything but if I'm not there Brandon Lewis so you know man the man that quarters this they will Jorge so there's a few that I'd like to get to but oldest developer weaker online conference I'm pretty sure I'll make that one since I can do that from the comfort of my own home and and the other beauty with offices we try and you know offer a lot of content throughout the year so if you guys can't make conferences we try and offer these road shows what we call them we basically offer a weekly seminar for one month on a dedicated topic so last year we had one on on containers we had one rest we had 120 bucks and so hoping that we get some more people out there but I said CF summit will be begging I'll be there in Vegas whether I'm speaking or not so if you guys can't make it as the box a bit to make it to see if summits we can catch up so I like to meet all my old friends and you know mid over time see if my community
Michaela 45:25
yeah I was talking with Alicia from Adobe about CF summit and I think they just announced a super early bird $99 special on CF summit West so
Unknown 45:35
yeah
Michaela 45:36
I forget the expiration date but it's only it
yeah it's only a few weeks you can get that price yeah
Gavin Pickin 45:43
and that's the thing is like when I'm speaking or not that's a good deal you know so
and that's one of the ones that I can actually drive to so like that as well so we can get out there and see this is a lot of fun last year me and Tony Tony junkies and Andrew Davis we had fun we went leads Brazilian food and with Top Golf and we have a lot of fun you know of course as always good content there too so
Michaela 46:10
right so if people want to find you online what are the best ways to do that Gavin well I
Gavin Pickin 46:16
said I am on the CFL slack g picking is where you find me most places on the CFL slack on the box team slack and then Twitter I'm at G picking on why I have a blog g picking calm but you also find me writing some blogs on otter solutions dot com as well so if you don't see too many posts on my G Pickens party because I'm too busy blogging it what it solutions dot com
those are the best ways to get ahold of me
so yeah so if you guys got any questions reach out Twitter's good way to get in touch or just jump on slack. You know we can have a little chat and see what we can
Unknown 46:56
catch up.
Michaela 46:57
Great. Well thanks for coming on the show today.
Gavin Pickin 47:01
Yeah, no problem. much appreciate it. Thanks for having me. And thanks for helping share the word about inside the box. It's gonna be a lot of fun this year and be good to see everybody so get your ticket don't miss out on the other workshops.