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Michaela Light
Welcome back to the show I'm here with Ray Camden famous Cold Fusion uh developer ai expert and general all-around great guy along with being a star wars fan and cat afectionado uh ray lives in louisiana one of the only state of the union that has a different law system I think and it does have great food and a bit of French influence. And he's a developer advocate, has been for many years. I think many, many years ago, a developer advocate or had some other title for Adobe, but you've now moved forward. And he has eight kids as well.
Raymond Camden
So eight kids, five cats, one dog.
Raymond Camden
No fish.
Michaela Light
Well, the cats might eat the fish. So welcome, Ray.
Raymond Camden
Hey, thank you for having me.
Michaela Light
And we're going to be talking about using AI with ColdFusion and development in general. Some of we're going to talk about are how some developers are kind of terrified about letting AI write code, having confidence in the code that's generated. How it can help if you have to move between languages. And we'll slip in some rag and AI sanity checking. And we'll ask Ray what he's been doing lately because that's always of interest. So tell us about how developers you talk to are frightened about using AI to write code. What do you think is going on?
Raymond Camden
I wouldn't say they're frightened. I think there's hesitation, maybe, because at least year or so ago, we saw so many vibe-coded things and heard vibe-coded horror stories. And I think, and from my personal experience, it wasn't necessarily fear, but I can remember about two years ago at a Microsoft conference. Using, I believe, Copilot. And my test was, hey, you know what? Create me a web component, but don't use a build step. I know how web components are built, but I was just curious to see what it would do. And it created a web component and it used a build step. And I saw that. All right. Okay. So I was like, no, don't do that. Create me a web component that doesn't use a build step. Took one more iteration and it built it perfectly fine. But the end result was essentially like only a scaffold, right? It was a code snippet. I'm like, yeah, you did that, but like that's something I could have typed in my editor and just reused. And so that was again a couple years ago. And what I have seen since then has been such a night and day difference in terms of what you could do. When you integrate AI with your development. Specifically, I'll use that same use case. Like, how would I do that now? First off, I wouldn't just do it as a one-off, right? I wouldn't just say, hey, build this for me. Instead, I would create a skill. And all of the Agentic platforms out there support skills. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's just a markdown file that says, hey, if I ask you to wash the dishes, this is what you do. You get the dishes, you turn the water, you blah, blah, blah. It's a step-by-step instruction. And if I were doing this today, I would have a skill in terms of, you know, when you build web components, I don't like build steps. Although in about five minutes, I'm going to contradict that a little bit probably. But, you know, I don't like a build step. I name my web components with like a singular type naming system. So not render cats, but like render cat. You I use camel case or Pascal case, whatever. You know, I would figure out what those things are. And what's so different now is that that skill is taking my way of building, but then I could use it for something specific. I need a web component that given a YouTube URL, it grabs the thumbnail URL. And there's like a standard syntax for that that YouTube supports that just grabs that thumbnail, renders out the HTML image tag, wraps it in an anchor tag that links to whatever. And because I built that skill, it knows, Ray said no build steps, so no lit, no lit framework. He has this kind of naming style for that. So, I'm follow that particular naming style, even to the point of like tabs versus, you know, all of that. But the end result is what I asked for, but with all those guardrails in, so I'm not, you know, taking thumbnails vibe coded and say, oh, I got to modify the name. I got to do this, I got to do that. I might as well have typed it by hand. And I think that's. Kind of quick and kind of high level, but that is the big shift I've seen over the last year is that with all of the guardrails around things, it is so much more efficient and easier to trust AI to build what I want. And lastly, I think there's still going to be people who don't want AI to write code. They want to write it themselves. You can tie AI into every single other part of that process. So I need to build Cowbell, I'm gonna do it by hand, but I'm gonna ask my AI agent: you know, can you give me like a plan for how I would do this? Can you give me some research in terms of how that's typically done? And that plan that came out, you may only agree with half of it, but when you look at that, your brain's like, oh, half right, half wrong. And this is wrong because I know better, blah, blah, blah. To me, that's still incredibly helpful because it's pointing out maybe something you missed. It's helping you kind of affirm your decision on, you know, where you don't agree with it. So that's not writing code for you, but it's giving you that feedback and it's helping you give you confidence. If you then write that code, you can then go back to AI and say, Hey, can you look at what I created? You remember what my plan was. Look I created. Did I miss anything? Did I forget something? Is there a security issue? Is there some weird thing that I may have missed? And once again, I go in with the expectation that that's not perfect. It's still an AI model created by humans, so it's not going to be perfect. But if it it finds most of the issues that I missed, then if I still want to give another human a chance to review, I can at least take care of a lot of the issues ahead of time. So when I hear people who do have hesitation about that, I tend to focus on all the other aspects. To bring it home even more to me, as someone who's been writing for a long time, I don't let AI write for me. Me. The exception to that is that every now and then I got something for executives and I don't speak executive, and I'm fine letting AI hit all the buzzwords and stuff. But for my blog, I have a skill that will look at my blog posts and it will look for spelling and grammar. And even though I have a spelling checker in my editor, I still miss it sometimes. But it will also find things that it will spell correctly, but it's the wrong word. So it's not really a grammar mistake. It's just, you know, find kind of weird stuff like that. And it does stuff like, you know, I'm blog about X, Y, and Z. That's what I'm covering in this entry. I can't tell you how many times I've done like X and Z and I just forgot to talk about Y. And no spell checker is going to find that. But my AI tool, like almost always, it notices. That. Or I'll be like, hey, you talked about Alpine.js, but maybe you should link to it. And so I appreciate that. And I definitely don't always take its suggestions. I use my own sanity and my own experience to know what makes sense. But again, even outside of having, even with not letting AI write my blog post for me. It is incredibly helpful. Also, for idea generation as well, for my writing, when I'm feeling like I have a really bad writer's blog, I don't know what to write about next. In the past, I've had said, hey, look at my blog, the last hundred or so entries, and maybe just suggest something that'd be a good follow-up. And I like that. You know, that's really freaking handy. All right, I feel like I talked for a very long time. Sorry.
Michaela Light
It's okay. It's good stuff. Yeah, I think there's value in AI checking our code or checking our writing. It can spot things that we may have missed or suggestions. So, and like you said, it can make us think of things we haven't thought of So even if we reject 50% of them, we still may get some good ideas from that. Now you mentioned in their confidence in AI generated code. And I've certainly seen some AI generated code that was, you know, 80% was good, but 20% was bad. But the AI was convinced very confidently that it was perfect code. And how dare you accuse it of messing up? Yeah. And then you criticize it and oh, I'm so sorry. I messed up.
Raymond Camden
This is where old school stuff comes back. And then like, if you have unit tests in play, you have an existing application, you're working with AI to add a new feature to it. Part of the confidence is the unit test, hopefully, that you've already written to ensure that adding this will be here, it didn't break over there. I feel like for 20 years in this industry, we've been talking about writing tests. We all know what the reality is, but this. With us relying more on AI generating code, this may put even more of an emphasis on there. And heck, you could also use AI to generate the unit tests. You still, at some point, I think, need to review what's happening. I won't lie and say I review 100% of what gets written in my own personal projects, but I absolutely look at the shape of things, look at function signatures and just eyeball things enough to make sure it makes sense.
Michaela Light
Well, that makes a good idea to check what it's sort of like if you had a, you know, an idiot savant genius intern helping you program. You sometimes they can produce really great code, sometimes they totally get the wrong end of the stick. So always good to to review what's done and have some tests and if you're using ai I I think it's good that you use a different ai to to do the verification part than the ai that generated because that often catch it and particularly if you give it a skill or a prompt that's like hey rip rip a new butthole for this code and tell me what's wrong instead of like fawn all over it.
Raymond Camden
I've, yeah, I've seen people smarter than me do stuff like that where they'll have two different models review something and basically have them fight it out, which I think is a great idea. I haven't gotten to that level myself. Also, you know, most of the code I generate has been typically for blog posts, for demos, for presentations and stuff. It's not giant monolith websites, if that makes sense.
Michaela Light
It does. Well, you wrote one of the first ColdFusion blog out there, Blog CFC, which I think is still out there somewhere. Someone else is maintaining it now.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, I'd given it to Scott Stroh's. I don't think he's working on it anymore. Yeah, I, you know what? I would not use a database driven, and anti-CF, like I wouldn't use a database-driven blog now just because it's content, a static site generator would be perfect for that.
Michaela Light
that because then you hold all the blog in my I think you wrote a blog on this right about how you converted your site uh to static html css javascript were you using astro or something else well when I first got into it I think it was hugo uh and I didn't like the way hugo works I switched to jekyll Jekyll was nice.
Raymond Camden
Jekyll was based on Ruby though, and Ruby was like a real pain to install on Windows or Mac. And it's probably my fault, but like I didn't like that dependency. And so I switched to 11D, which is a Node.js-backed one about three or so years ago. And I like the fact that it's based on Node. I like that it's very open-ended. Hugo was a bit locked down at places where 110 is like, I'll let you do anything you want. And so I have been incredibly happy with that. You can absolutely do blogs on Astro. I like Astro a lot. But I don't plan on migrating my blog because it's good. Like I could die tomorrow and it's fine.
Michaela Light
Try not to die tomorrow. We've had too many cold fusion deaths.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry to be glib about that. But like, I know with it being static, at least in production, like if I decide to walk away from tech, that's more likely than me passing away. I could just leave it there and never touch it again.
Michaela Light
I mean, the other thing is there's very low surface for it to be attacked by hackers. And seeing as hackers are getting using AI themselves and being a lot more devious, I think that's an important factor. And then, of course, it runs faster, which keeps Google happy. So I think there's a lot of benefit to static site generation. Though, of course, we can't do that for everything. And some people do a headless CMS behind the static, you know. So they get the best of both worlds. So now you mentioned some other languages in there. How have you used AI to help learning new languages? Because people are always doing that. Yeah.
Michaela Light
The new languages part.
Michaela Light
They may not be using AI to help, but you're going enlighten them.
Raymond Camden
them. I so last like just two weeks, I had kind of realized that I hadn't really written a lot of code lately. I produced a lot of code. I hadn't really written a lot of code. And I honestly was just missing writing code by hand or at least partially by hand. And I thought, you know what? I have known about TypeScript for a very long time. I've absolutely worked with it in the past, but I never really learned it. And so I thought, you know what? Let me just spend some time learning it. And I threw Veet in there as well. And one of the things that I kind of did was I used AI in multiple ways in that respect, partially in terms of, hey, I'm learning TypeScript and I think X, does this make sense? Which is not something necessarily that'd be very easy to Google. Like you could Google how to do so-and-so in TypeScript, and you'll find documentation or whatever. I was kind of looking for, I'm going approach it this way. I'm new to TypeScript. Does this make sense and why? And for that, I was primarily using Claude, and very great at saying, Yeah, you know, this makes sense. And here's the reference in terms of why it makes sense. The other aspect of that is that there's been, you know, I knew TypeScript syntax basically. So, like, you know, const name colon string equals ray. Like, oh, yeah, the colon string is the TypeScript part. It's saying this variable is a string. But there's been some more obscure TypeScript syntax things that made no sense to me at all. And that's the kind of thing you can't really Google. Or at least you haven't been able to until they added AI crap, AI stuff in the search results. But, like, weird syntax stuff, and I've seen this with Python as well. Um, you would not be able to Google that because it's like an operator, and like if you don't know what the feature is, you can't Google to learn more about the feature. Uh, I'll go back to Python for this where. I saw them using an AND operator in a line of code, and the syntax did not make sense at all to me. And I could not Google that because it was just the AND operator. And with AI, what I discovered is that in Python, you can not overwrite, you can modify how operands work on objects. So if I have a cat object, if I have two cat objects, I could say, hey, when you add those together using the built-in plus symbol, in my class method, I could actually say, oh, this is what it means to add those two object instances together. That's that's cool as heck. Feels like a massive foot gun as well. But, like, not knowing that that was part of Python, I would have struggled to get there. Whereas my AI tool very quickly explained what was going on. I'm seeing that with TypeScript as well. Just last night, you know, I've done one or two vlog posts with me just kind of barely touching it. Last night, I built a real app, a very small app, but like multiple times, I relied on the AI to kind of help me sanity check the syntax, to give me feedback. I was still writing by hand. Taking some code from what AI generated, but writing most of it by hand. And that was great. It's like I had my own little TypeScript intern there to help me out.
Michaela Light
So just walk us through exactly the steps you were doing there. Were you copying and pasting a line of code into AI and say, explain this line? I don't get what this plus sign's doing. 100%.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, for the Python example. To quickly see if I can find that line. Yeah, it was some wonky like bracket. And oh, and in this same project that I worked on last night, I'm using Web Awesome, which is a UI library built on web components. Kind of like Bootstrap, but a bit more advanced, I think. But one of the things that shares with Bootstrap is that it ships with all these CSS utility things, where if I add like class equals VW, that means very wide, right? By the way, I just made that up. But like, I didn't want to go through all the CSS documentation on that. So, like, I web component, like, hey, I need to do a grid layout for this. Or I think more specifically, I had an input field and I had a button. And by default, they were on two lines, and I wanted to put them on one line. And that was easy to do in WebAwesome. If I had read the docs, I had not read the docs, I had read just enough to be dangerous. And the AI tool for me, very handy to say, oh, this is how you would get that look and feel.
Michaela Light
I mean, I I'll give folks a a similar thing. If you're learning another language like French or Spanish or Greek or whatever, and you can just, you know, and you suppose I do this for real. I'm sending WhatsApp messages to friends in Spanish. I know I've screwed up the Spanish, or I'd like a sanity check. Did I get this correct? And it'll, you know, rip apart my what I wrote. And tell me exactly where I got it wrong so I can retype it. And I retype it, obviously I could copy and paste whatever genius thing it came up with, but I want to get the muscle memory of how to do that. So and that same is true with program languages. There's some muscle memory in typing stuff that helps. And I do have concern for our younger programming brethren and sister in or whatever that's called.
Raymond Camden
that if they only copy and paste code they may never understand quite what they're doing you know we had this we had that same argument or same worry with stack overflow right like oh there's stack overflow developers are just copying and pasting and yes I did that as well um now I I feel like when stack overflow came around 10 years or so ago whatever 20. Well, like, I feel like by the time I was using Stack Overflow, I was already an expert in development. Not that I knew everything. Obviously, I wouldn't be on Stack Overflow, but I had enough institutional experience to understand what I'm copying and pasting and to be able to sanity check. That is something that, as an industry, we darn well better not lose, or it's going to be really, really bad.
Michaela Light
I mean, like, just like Stack Overhelp flow helped preserve a lot of knowledge because it got detailed in questions and answers and comments and things.
Raymond Camden
Yeah. I mean, like, going back to the whole confidence thing, right? Like, as someone who's been in this industry, I, yeah, test, duh. Test is how you verify. And when you add something new, you add more tests, and it's not. Perfect but it gives you a heck of a lot more confidence knowing that again adding a didn't break b knowing that that's not a language thing it's a professional developer type thing that is something we cannot lose or there'll be hell to pay for later on well there may well be hell to pay later on independent of that idea but uh let's stay positive um Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you were at CF United 2005, but Joel Splowski, who founded Stack Overflow, gave a keynote of that.
Michaela Light
I was actually slightly yeah, he's a great speaker. And for Microsoft before he started his own company that does bug tracking software. And he writes a great blog. I don't know if he's still blogging, but he used to write these really long articles about hiring developers and, you know, helping interns to learn stuff and why it's important. I am concerned in our modern AI development world and also other industries, right? That there just are not that many entry-level jobs. And how does someone young get into? Coding. And I mean, they can do it themselves if they're motivated, but it's much easier if there's some kind of entry-level job you can do. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, it's an interesting time. You know, I absolutely believe, yeah, we definitely need entry-level. People. I mean, that's the way it's supposed to work, right? You become entry, you get the experience, you become senior, and then you help the entry-level people. I think there needs to be a change, perhaps, in what that path is. I still think there needs to be entry-level jobs. I cannot tell you what that change would be. I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. I mean, I think part of it. It is focusing less on the language because your AI agent may be generating that for you and focusing more on the methodology in terms of, you know, this is how we do something now. We create a plan first, right? Which in theory, we should have been doing since day one. But let's be honest, you in the past, it was typically boss wants you to add cowbell. So you just start writing code.
Michaela Light
It comes in and says more cowbell.
Raymond Camden
Right.
Raymond Camden
So that old way of doing things was wrong back then, right? For some people, certainly there were people who were like, Yeah, we're going to plan the heck out. I mean, write a PRD, right? Write this 10-page document that explains how we're going to do that. I still think that's important. I may let AI generate that, but that procedure of we're adding something significant. We need to talk about it and plan it and realize what's going to happen first. That hasn't changed. How we write that has changed, but that need hasn't changed. On the flip side, again, going back to verification, how we do that, that's just as important now as it was in the past, if not more so. So, if I was imagining a comp side type program or a development type program, Again, I wouldn't care about the language, like JavaScript, Python, whatever. It's all these fun, all these processes of how to, it's the software development process in general that is what I would want people to learn. I know when I got into this, I wasn't thinking about that. I was learning basic. Like, that was my first language. I learned basic, then I learned Pascal, then I learned Perl, then I learned HTML and JavaScript and CoolFusion. But like, the actual processes were like painful lessons over time. Um, it was attending conferences, people were talking about writing unit tests, you and stuff like that.
Michaela Light
Unit test? What's that? Yes, yes, that's in the hallway track often. Yeah, you hear these things. Um, I hope we're see you at CF Summit in the future. Um, that might be a possibility.
Raymond Camden
I would love to. Adobe puts on a good show. They do. I've been impressed every time I've been to one. Yeah.
Michaela Light
Well, you cut the cake for the 30th anniversary. So along with Charlie and who are Mark, maybe. So let's talk a little bit about these AI. I call them IDEs, but maybe you've got a better name for them.
Raymond Camden
genetic development platforms, I guess.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, okay.
Michaela Light
Yeah, I that would mean things like clawed code or cursor or Gemini's little thing or code.
Raymond Camden
Anti-gravity, what they call theirs, gravity, anti-gravity.
Michaela Light
That's because it keeps falling down. Is that why? No, boom, boom, boom. You can't say that.
Raymond Camden
Yeah, yeah, no, I won't comment on that. I mean, I will. I'll fall back to in terms of Google. Um, two, three years ago, Gemini, their APIs were free, uh, free to, free to learn on production you had to pay for. But, uh, ChatGPT, their APIs were not free. Um, so I didn't use it. I used what was free to use and what I could learn on. Uh, so they deserve some credit for, for doing that. Of course, Google can afford to spend trillions or whatever.
Michaela Light
Uh, yes, and what compute money that they spend.
Raymond Camden
Like, in terms of IDE, like, I lived and breathed video studio code for the last five years. Um, I don't miss Eclipse at all, thank God. Uh, but I have really switched more to agentic uh development programs, like you mentioned, uh, because the way I build now is, yeah, I'm thinking about. X. So let's plan it. And I'll talk with my agent about that. And then I'll create a plan. And I'll say, all right, I want you to implement it. And when you're done, I'll look at code then. So I still definitely look at code. But my main interface now is working with my agent or typically multiple agents at once. That's something that is really a force multiplier. It sounds very buzzwordy, but being able to say, I need Cowbell to this. Let's make a plan. Great, you've made a plan. I want you to implement that plan. And then with another agent, I want you to write the documentation for it. And then with another agent, I want you to update the change log as well and just push that out. And it's like I have three interns working for me now.
Michaela Light
Yeah, well, that's great. And sometimes they agree, sometimes they fight it out. Hopefully creates better code.
Raymond Camden
do you think we're coming to a point where people just won't be typing code they'll just be tailing that either typing or speaking to that ai agent agenic agent dev tool I think I think there'll be less typing for sure um you know uh speaking of less typing um I was working on a project about eight months ago and it was bootstrap um And I like Bootstrap, but Bootstrap is incredibly verbose, right? So, like, one row in a form with the label and the field and the validation, it's just a lot of typing. And in Visual Studio Code, using Copilot, I'm pretty sure it was like, you know, I had taken a field that was first name and last name, and then I needed to add email, let's say. As soon as I began typing, the agent knew. Oh, hey, he's using this layout for form fields. Basically, what was above, it suggested the whole thing for me. And this was actually a cold fusion site and it had no problems with, you know, value equals quote, pound, you know, I think it was framework one, so RC dot something or FW, but it intelligently said. He's working in a bootstrap form in a cold fusion site using this type of naming system. I'm just going to suggest that for me. And that's not even really vibe coding. It's spicy autocomplete, but that was still really darn useful. I appreciated that because I did not want to type all that bootstrap code.
Michaela Light
Well, and a lot of IDEs will give you a drop-down list of parameter values. And like you say, they can. Do that. And maybe, in some sense, these AI development tools are sort of like autocomplete on steroids. Instead of you typing a sentence, now you're giving an idea, and it's kind of auto-completing the idea into a whole paragraph of code.
Raymond Camden
The only caveat I would give to that is: I really feel like you need you being the objective. Vague you, not you particular. You really need to think about the entire software development lifecycle. So, whereas the spicy autocomplete, I called it, which I liked, is very kind of file-centric. With Agentic development, it's much more feature-driven. It's much more, you know, the entire process, the planning, the building, the verifying. When you start bringing in automations as well, it's less human driven. So, somebody last night at 2 a.m., they filed a Jerry ticket on something broken. I can wake up, and my AI agent has already looked at it and already fixed it and written a PR for it. If its fix was complete BS, if it looked at the bug, if it found the line, oh, yeah, or this is where it's bad, and this is my fix. Even if I hate the fix, I'm like, oh, you know, thank you. Thank you for responding at 2 a.m. When I was sleeping, for finding the bug. You correctly identified it. I would have taken a different approach. And heck, I'll probably just go back to my agent and say, hey, you fix stuff like this, do it this way instead. And tying back again to this whole development life cycle. When that happens, I build a skill. I teach my agent, hey, you fixed something, you did it the wrong way. From now on, I want you to do it this way. And the next time that happens at 2 a.m., it actually does it the right way, which I think is just incredible.
Michaela Light
That is incredible. Are you letting your AI edit your skills, you know, with new information, or are you restricting that to you yourself?
Raymond Camden
I let it, you know, and skills are just markdown files. So it's in source control, right? So if for some reason my agent did something wrong, and that also ties into something that I've enjoyed doing AI for: I will ask my AI agent, am I using you right? Or here's a skill that you and I built together. Do you have any suggestions for how it can be improved? Like, look at my code base, look at my git commits. Over the last week. You've seen what I've been doing. Can the skill be done better? I have found that really, really useful.
Michaela Light
That's great. So, I mean, one idea that's floating around is that when we started coding on computers in the 1950s, we wrote machine language. Then someone invented assembler because they got tired of putting digits into things because it's very error prone. And then we invented compilers to produce the assembly language, to produce the machine code. Then produced higher level languages like CoreFusion that compile into Java bytecode, which then is turned into machine language eventually and run. Is AI coding a kind of even higher level abstraction, like a super compiler? That you deal with it in concepts instead of lines of code.
Raymond Camden
I can see that, see that take again. My only caveat to that is what I just talked about: how we're thinking much more than just producing files. You know, again, it's that whole process. It's thinking about the project as a whole, thinking about Heck, even just basic maintenance. Hey, look at my server logs. What is not performing well? You know, that I think your first take is accurate, but it maps more to how, like, framework one, it saves you a lot of typing, right? Because it handles a lot of form you are processing, whatever. It's that. But to me, the power of AI comes again to the entire software development lifecycle. I feel like an executive every time I see that. But again, that's where I am seeing the benefits.
Michaela Light
So does that make the language that the code is written in kind of irrelevant at some point in the future? Who cares if the AI generates ColdFusion or Node.js, unless there's a specific user requirement, you know, for something, some feature that's in the language.
Raymond Camden
Well, I mean, but that's always been true, right? Like we've always had multiple solutions, Node, ColdFusion, PHP,.NET, et cetera. You know, it was the deciding fact, and they all were roughly the same. Right? They all let you build web apps. They had different pluses, different minuses. The question came down to where is this be deployed? And where does it have to run in production? Because that impacts where the decision is. For our engineering staff, what are they competent in? What can they create in? We've always had. Multiple options, but we always had to think about where things were going to go. So I think, yes, it is reducing the dependency on the language itself. And I don't think I landed that conversation thread very well. I think I'm agreeing with you. And trying a but, but I didn't, I didn't find a but
Michaela Light
Well, you can ask II where the butt would fit in later and place it in. But that to me seems to be partly where we're going. Now, of course, some languages are much more AI friendly, like ColdFusion, as you probably know, introduced an MCP for the documentation. So, AI, you know, your AI agent development tool can talk to the ColdFusion documentation and figure out stuff much better than just doing its search thing to find stuff. So, um I think there is going to be moves to make languages more AI friendly.
Raymond Camden
You have to almost. I mean, you know, being in developer relations, I was always thinking about our docs and how approachable they are and, you know, serving the needs of our users, whether they're a learner or they're coming in just because they're forced to learn a language for a little bit and it's Friday, 5 p.m. They need to get something done. Serving our AI drivers now is just one more audience member and probably the most important one.
Michaela Light
Does seem to be. So what have you been doing lately, Ray?
Raymond Camden
TypeScript, really. So my job is no longer developer relations per se. It's customer education, but it's still, tools. I want you to be better at it. Let me help you with that. So I'm not necessarily working on like documentation and stuff, but I'm still building demo apps to help people learn. I'm still recruiting slide decks and stuff. It's less going to a conference and speaking to a random set of people and more you're already paying us and you want to be happy with the money you're spending and your people are not necessarily using the tool to the best of their ability. I can help with that. I could say, hey, y'all people are not using rules and skills. You know, and you're not as happy. Well, rules and skills could possibly make you a lot happy with that and make you more productive. Great.
Michaela Light
Well, good luck in your exciting new career doing that. How can people find you online best? Raymond.
Raymond Camden
Hit my blog up, please.
Raymond Camden
All right.
Raymond Camden
And they could find a link to my Amazon wish list, which I won't name the person, but somebody in our community actually hit that recently, about two weeks ago, and I appreciate it. It had been quite some time.
Michaela Light
I will make a note of the Amazon wish list. And I put the website there. Are you active on any social media or is that kept quiet?
Raymond Camden
I, well, love-hate type thing. So I'm not on X. I am on Blue Sky, Threads, and Mastodon, but I would say mostly Threads because I have found the conversations just a bit more fun. When it comes, so I used to get a lot of traffic from going on Twitter and say, here's my blog post. Rarely get interactions about my blog posts or tech stuff anymore. So actually I use LinkedIn more for that now. Like, hey, I did a blog post about TypeScript. And I find out I'll get a lot more comments and interactions that way. When I'm on threads, it is me sharing fun slash dumb slash comic book slash music video game, whatever type stuff.
Michaela Light
You have many interests. I would think. I do. I mean, one thing I I totally accept that you you don't post on X. I will say from my posting on X, I too don't get a lot of engagement there. But what I do get is AIs index that text. So and I'm not sure they index LinkedIn as quite as much 'cause Microsoft who owns LinkedIn is a bit more protective perhaps of the content.
Raymond Camden
My, like, I don't know how much of my traffic is bought, but my traffic.
Michaela Light
Oh it's enormous. Ours was used to be 50%. Now I think it's like 60, 70% is bought. And I can tell because it all comes out of wacko countries.
Raymond Camden
Yeah. I tend to just look at like my raw like page views, which I know is not scientific, but it's my general thermometer for how I'm doing. And for years, it was 800 to a million page views a month. And then like two months ago, it dropped by half, which is still a respectable 500K plus. But like AI has been around for a lot longer than that. So I'm not sure what happened two months ago for it to drop.
Michaela Light
Oh, you have to look up your MCP to the Google Analytics and ask it to give you some clues.
Raymond Camden
I hate Google Analytics.
Michaela Light
Well, I hate it too. That's why I'm saying have the AI deal with Google Analytics.
Raymond Camden
I use Netlafly analytics. And actually, going back to AI, I have been, I've started with an AI agent, a like marketing/slash task. Basically, hey, I have this blog. I want it to be a bit more successful. I also would like to find a sponsor. Not that my costs are very high. But like, I want to treat raymondcamden.com as a property, you know. It's it's yes, it's my personal diary, but like, what can I do to just increase viewership, readership, I should say, etc.
Michaela Light
Cat photos, yeah.
Raymond Camden
So, I've started an AI agent on it, I haven't had time to like really work with it. Uh, but what's been nice about that, I don't really know marketing, so I. I'm fine kind of trusting AI to help me on that because I know nothing in that area.
Michaela Light
Well, you seem for someone who doesn't know marketing, you seem to have been good over the decades of marketing, the concepts you share.
Raymond Camden
You know, not to open up a giant other topic, but like imposter syndrome, right? Like we don't, we think we don't know anything. What I try to remind myself is that there is a chance I know nothing. There's a chance that I have faked everything, but I have done that for 20 years and I have fed my family and kept a home. So if I am a huge imposter, I can at least say, hey, my kids are clothed and fed and happy. My wife is clothed and fed and happy. So I've done that at least.
Michaela Light
Plus, your Star Wars model collection has grown.
Raymond Camden
I know I haven't fuzzed behind me because of work meetings and stuff like that. So I apologize.
Michaela Light
Could have one fuzz it to let us see your amazing collection, or is that if I can do, yeah, I don't mind doing that at all.
Raymond Camden
There we go. Blur my background. There you go. That's very small.
Michaela Light
That collection it says Star Wars, and I think I can see little figurines. Oh, yeah. I think I see Yoda jumping up and down.
Raymond Camden
It's all I actually have a seven.
Michaela Light
Is that the Death Star?
Raymond Camden
Oh, yeah.
Michaela Light
But it seems to have a bite taken out of it.
Raymond Camden
That's the second Death Star, and it was still being constructed.
Michaela Light
So you have a fountain of knowledge about Star Wars.
Raymond Camden
Not important stuff, but a lot of Star Wars and et cetera knowledge.
Michaela Light
Yes, you could be hired as the programming consultant on the next Star Wars movie. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Ray, and wish you the best for the rest of 2026 and keep with you another time.
Michaela Light
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
