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Michaela Light: 00:00:03 Welcome back to the show here we have a special episode of the hundredth episode of BC apply podcast. I have a very special guest with us today, Nolan, who is the person who's appeared on the show the most, I think you've appeared like six or seven times because you just have so much to say about cold fusion. So, um, and you're very generous with your time, uh, which I appreciate. So in today's show, we're gonna turn the view a little bit back, um, and look at the CFLI revolution and how things have changed since the cold fusion. A live podcast has been more and a lot of other things happening in ColdFusion land and also have a peek at what's coming in the future for improving ColdFusion. So, welcome Nolan. Thanks for having me. And just in case you don't know who Nolan is, he's the chief architect president and, uh, I don't know. Well, advertise you have at South sash Shasta productions in Sacramento, California. And he is a very frequent speaker. I hope you [inaudible] conferences, user groups, a rabid blogger about Copia writing. That's the right phrase. Rabid. I don't know. He blocked him off, uh, about cold fusion and he writes these excellent post-conference for that. Um, tell you what happened in case you missed the conference. Very good to have you here. So, um, [inaudible] yeah, I think you should be interviewing me. Shouldn't you should just be chatting and having a good time. I'm not sure.
Michaela Light: 00:01:39 Um, I think we should do, let's ask the audience audience who should interview you?
Nolan Erck: 00:01:43 Well, it's just chatting on a good time. Oh, who said that?
Michaela Light: 00:01:47 It was a, yeah, it was the thousands of CFOs listening [inaudible] AI bots episode. So a hundredth episode. Um, and I think, I guess we should start with what is the CFLI for revolution? Cause like we've got this podcast, I wrote a book, you, Louis and the Adobe folks and many other people are doing great things, uh, to improve ColdFusion, but people may not realize that there is a CF alive revolution going on. Um, making cold fusion, more modern, vibrant, insecure, and to quote, misquote someone who will remain nameless to avoid having nasty tweets. And to me, making ColdFusion great again. Um, you know, w w w what do you think with CF alive revolution is no,
Nolan Erck: 00:02:43 the five revolution. I, I guess I have two answers to that. One. Is it the overall, it, it never went away. It's not like cold fusion has actually died or that they're not releasing new versions of it. So the, the amount of cold fusion related development from Adobe and Adobe related partners and things is always, you know, been moving forward. Like I would personally attribute the revolution part of it to things more like the work you're doing yourself with the book and the podcast and um, community members doing what they can to show that it is possible to write modern, secure code of ColdFusion and show that the community is growing and that there are all of the same sort of resources available to the CFML of world that there are to the Ruby or.net world or you know, the other platforms.
Michaela Light: 00:03:38 Yeah. And I think we should give a shout out to Brad wood who's done a lot of work too to show the, well he's done a lot of evangelism for cold fusion. He's got onto Reddit, you know, it's sort of like going into the den with the lion's while they attack you.
Nolan Erck: 00:03:52 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Brad sent a tremendous job, um, in, uh, if nothing else, Brad is responsible for command box, which for me as a consultant these days, I consider that sort of the dividing line between modern CFML development and people maintain your legacy apps that are not looking forward at all. If you have command box installed, that's the, that's the game changer right there. Just having that installed and we all love it. We owe that all to Brad.
Michaela Light: 00:04:25 Hey. Oh Hey. Oh Brad. Um, we should Pat him on. Well, maybe we'll get, have a bigger get together. We chatted a bit about that before we started hitting record. It's just so hard to schedule everyone to get on the show at one time. But, uh, maybe in a few trips we'll do a panel discussion around this. Um, I did, I did want to do something special for the laundry with that. So, um, so yeah, I mean like how I wrote on the back of the book book, cold fusion is a vibrant and modern language, you know, and you can make really complicated data-driven enterprise apps with it and people have millions of lines of ColdFusion code in some of their apps. Um, and uh, those, some folks of abandoned ColdFusion is dying, which kind of ever died. Um, you know, more visionary dev teams have embraced cold fusion and you know, there's lots of people writing modern ColdFusion these days writing some code, secure cold fusion and they're just using a really modern development environment and ecosystem using Docker and c'mon bumps and all kinds of other goodies we'll talk about a bit later that have emerged in the last few years.
Michaela Light: 00:05:34 So a very exciting time we live in is that Chinese property goes right. Maybe you live in interesting times. Um, so maybe we should just roll back the time machine and ask, you know, why was the CFLI revolution, uh, started? Uh, cause it's quite a lot of work to do this as I know you do a lot of flying around the country and telling people about good things and cold fusion writing articles. New blog isn't something that happens in your sleep. Yeah, actually
Nolan Erck: 00:06:09 true. I'm done. I don't think I've personally, this might sound arrogant or, or what have you. I'm not sure, but I don't think I've done anything that different in the last two years. I've, you know, where we're coming with the revolution time than I have previously. Like I write blog entries and I do the conference notes and things on my website pretty regularly. Um, that's all got a self-serving component to it as well, to be perfectly honest. Like I add new content to my website because that generates more traffic and then people look at the blog and go, Oh, this is a consulting firm. They might actually, they might be able to help us with some problem with our cold fusion site. And so we, I do it too. It's sort of a win-win. I get to contribute to the community. And then it of course, you know, um, sparks conversations with people both at other conferences and, uh, on the web.
Nolan Erck: 00:07:02 And then the same is true with speaking or conferences. I make my living networking with people. So I do a lot of networking, um, as many times as I can throughout the year speaking at user groups and conferences and things. So for me personally, I don't think I've done all that much different for the revolution part of it. But again, I would point that back to some of the work that folks like you are doing and some of the things that the orders team has come out with them in the last couple of years. Command box, again, being a great one, forge box being a huge game changer as well, but I don't think quite gets the visibility or um, recognition that it could in other platforms. And then
Michaela Light: 00:07:38 stepchild of the box family as Brad might saying, Oh, I'll just channel a little bit of Brad. I did do an episode on forge box, I think, uh, with um, a Z. Gareth, I'm missing his name. I apologize in advance.
Speaker 3: 00:07:58 Um,
Michaela Light: 00:08:01 it'll come back to me. I'll, I'll correct myself in a moment. Sometimes my brain doesn't keep up with my spirit or whatever the phrase phrases. I know the feeling. Yeah. Um, but yeah, football is definitely, um, you know, is a, is a game changer for doing it. You know, packaging your, your Coda in that with other folks.
Nolan Erck: 00:08:22 Everyone, like the.net team has their own package management, the name of which is escaping me at the moment, but they have one, the Ruby community has a node of course, and the JavaScript world has NPM, which gets tons of spotlight on it. And that kind of thing really does make those platforms, um, much more efficient. When you want to install a new library or whatever the building blocks are, that you need to start a Ruby app, a.net app, a node, JS app, whatever. Um, 10 years ago it used to mean go to these nine websites, download these of files, you know, edit a handful of config files. You know, you had did a lot of manually wiring things together to get platforms to start. And now in the Java script world, if you type, NPM install and the name of your package and it just, you know, grabs the things that needs, why are some together for you automatically, it's all sort of scripted and put together.
Nolan Erck: 00:09:18 And that's been a game changer for everything in JavaScript land and everything in dotnet land and so on. And that's one of the things that [inaudible] does. Yeah. And that's what ColdFusion and CFML has with forge box is you, you type your box, install product name and it goes out to forge box and grabs the zip file or whatever the thing is that it means why are some together and it configures everything for you. Like people used to, um, not like cold box for instance, because getting a cold box app, um, to start from a brand new like empty DubDubDub route took, took a little bit of work, download cold box on zip it and you have to put it in a folder with this name. Um, it's pretty good now about like everything works by default out of the box, but you still have to download it and unzip it.
Nolan Erck: 00:10:08 And put it in a folder and then make a couple of folders manually where your code would go. You make a, um, a views folder and a handler's folder and put your files in there. And now just box install cold box. You wait five seconds and it's there. And then you did box create app, you wait five seconds and you have an app and it's done. And that's all because of things like forge box that help us. And so, um, and people know about that more now because forge box exists and there's been a lot of talk about those sorts of products at the conferences and on the web and on podcasts such as this one. And um, we have books now like the CFLI book that helps provide sort of a reference guide, if you will, for all of the stuff that's available in the modern CFML community that didn't used to be there.
Speaker 4: 00:10:55 Okay.
Michaela Light: 00:10:57 I think it's amazing the ecosystem changes that happen. I mean the language, we'll talk a bit more about the language changes have occurred with both Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee. Um, but the ecosystem changes are amazing. Anyway, coming back to this question, why, why this CF, why revolution got started? Um, I think one of the major emphasis is from the, uh, annual state, the called patient union survey. And, um, we have a question in there. What aspects of cold fusion are preventing you or your company or embracing cold fusion? And the most popular answer there w was CF is seeing is seen as dying or legacy, which 72% of people back in 2008, um, was saying and a similar number in 2017 and in previous years it's been a problem. So I just got tired of seeing that. It's like, look, the truth is it isn't dying. You know, technologically the technology has been improving with the new releases every two years. New ecosystem changes, new box products, new other third party products.
Speaker 3: 00:12:02 Hmm.
Michaela Light: 00:12:02 You know, new companies using ColdFusion,
Speaker 3: 00:12:06 um,
Michaela Light: 00:12:06 you know, the cohesion revenue going up quarter over quarter last seven years. I mean, it's a lot of, um, good things happening, but the perception is not seen that way both by copying developers, which I find, you know, I get upset by that. It's depressing and seeing all these people upset about him.
Speaker 3: 00:12:26 Um,
Michaela Light: 00:12:27 feeling what, what Luis, uh, uh, cool language. Shame. Yeah. Um, the people are just ashamed to be programming and co-creation and everything. I've seen a lot of depression and burnout, you know, out in cold fusion.
Speaker 3: 00:12:43 [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 00:12:44 alright. I want to change that. Get people excited and doing new stuff and learning again. No, not stuck.
Nolan Erck: 00:12:52 Yeah, I think we are in a
Speaker 3: 00:12:55 okay.
Nolan Erck: 00:12:56 Um, maybe unique to cold fusion spot where I think they're just, this is just my opinion. I feel like the, what we'll call the nine to five programmers are maybe more prevalent in the ColdFusion space than they are in the JavaScript space or the.net space or what have you. Um, I'm certainly, I'm certain there are nine to five programmers in other platforms. Um, but it seemed like they, yeah, the ones in cold fusion land are maybe more vocal or more prominent in some way. And what I mean by that, art developers that they go to their day job, they worked from nine to five and at five Oh one they turn their brain off and don't want to worry about code stuff anymore at all. And so unless they're companies and their bosses are physically showing them at two o'clock in the afternoon, look at all the new stuff you can do with cold fusion.
Nolan Erck: 00:13:48 Um, it's flying past them. So there are a lot of developers that we run into at some of the different events throughout the year or will, you know, they'll ask a question and we'll say things like, Oh, well why don't you just, I've actually had this happened within the last year. I was at a ColdFusion conference and I won't name where I was at or what was going on at the time, just to try to keep it a little more general, the helpful and not sound like I'm picking on someone, but it was at a conference talking about API APIs and said, okay, well you would hook your code up, you know, your ColdFusion code would do this. And then it would just return adjacent API. And this was in 2019. The response I got from three people in the room was, what is Jason? Um, and so I feel like
Michaela Light: 00:14:29 really cool technology [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 00:14:30 yeah, that's been a real long, long time. And it's a really common piece of development vernacular nowadays. And I was someone that, that was the response from multiple people in the room at a conference. And that's just, that's the mentality that I chunk of the ColdFusion developers have for better or worse or better because they were, you know, for whatever reason we have trunks of people that don't know what the modern web is doing yet. And so they're behind the times and learning like that coefficient is still vibrant and the throw
Michaela Light: 00:15:00 because they know they in their companies are not investing enough in learning and training. It is always been a cost. It has been always a fast moving, changing deal. And to be honest, if you're not growing and learning, you're dying.
Nolan Erck: 00:15:17 Yeah, there was a great, um, me and my sock going around a little while ago that said, software developers are students that have agreed to do homework for the rest of their lives and they're like, yeah, the good ones. Yeah, that's pretty accurate, you know? Yeah. There's, there's always a concern if you have to.
Michaela Light: 00:15:31 I would, I would rephrase that. It's not work because people who are good at this, they don't make it work. They enjoy it. They like playing with new technologies. It's home play, you know, it's not homework.
Nolan Erck: 00:15:44 It is, and I think the trick with that is the, um, question of how do you learn the new things while still maintaining the healthy work life balance? Because you need to do your nine to five work where you're getting paid while also keeping an eye on what's coming over the horizon. But that doesn't necessarily mean your staff to spend 20 hours a day writing code and reading blogs and scrolling through everything on Twitter and Slack and whatever. Um, that's gotta be,
Michaela Light: 00:16:10 it would be great, you know.
Nolan Erck: 00:16:11 Well, I'm a big fan of the 30 minutes a day philosophy. I think you and I have talked about before, it's been a fun, a half an hour a day to do whatever the new project is. If it's, I need to learn angular than great, spend 30 minutes a day until you can build an angular app and do that. Or if it's, I need to learn how to use command box or forge box, come up with a goal, I will make my first command box package and then just do half an hour a day every day to get that point. And it is possible, I think to do small chunks of time like that consistently and get these, these goals and we just don't have as, um, I don't think that that kind of mentality has been promoted as much in some of the ColdFusion shops across at least the U S as a, they could be.
Michaela Light: 00:16:56 I mean, just look at what Google does for their staff, don't they allocate 20% of the time to just playing around or doing new things. And that's where some major products come out or Google buy pizza like that. So I'm not saying, you know, you have to have that in your organization, but you know, maybe a lunch and learn kind of thing.
Nolan Erck: 00:17:18 Yeah, that'd be, that's, those are great too.
Michaela Light: 00:17:21 Um, there are many ways to do this. So, um, with be learning. Um,
Speaker 5: 00:17:30 so
Michaela Light: 00:17:32 I did look up in the archive what the first episode was it, it was actually between Carlos Gomez and he talked all about CF WebSockets and this was back in March, 2017. So actually it's nearly 18 months ago. No, 18 months. Whatever you want to. I'll do the math. Uh,
Nolan Erck: 00:17:54 2018 or nine months ago, something like that.
Michaela Light: 00:17:57 Yeah, it's two and a half years. [inaudible] whatever that is in months. 30 something, 30 months. There you go. So it's been quite a while. And so let's talk about what has changed in ColdFusion land,
Speaker 3: 00:18:14 um,
Michaela Light: 00:18:14 since this initiative started. Because,
Speaker 3: 00:18:18 um,
Michaela Light: 00:18:19 you know, sometimes when you, I don't know if you've ever done mass change movements where you're trying to get hundreds of thousands of people to change their beliefs, cause that's sort of where you were talking about the perception that ColdFusion is dying being changed. And that's a belief in someone's head. It's not the reality of the technology. Um, and it seems to take quite a while to get it, thousands of people to change their minds. Um, cause people have cognitive bias that they sort of reinforce their beliefs with the evidence they see. Um, even if the evidence is not, say, you know, doesn't support that. So, um,
Speaker 3: 00:19:02 um,
Michaela Light: 00:19:05 whoops. Let's, uh, all right, now we have better lighting in the video. Um, so some of the things came, you know, course we started the podcast, I released the CFLI book. Um, and those have been good. And also I just wanna give a shout out to, uh, is Gavin at a autists? That was, the name was Turner. Remember? Um, Gavin and the rest of the order's team started the modernize or die podcast as well because when I started the podcast, there was no cold fusion podcast. It used to be the CFR, but come to an end after many hundreds of episodes. Um, so lots of cool innovations, uh, going on. So what else is, is change to make ColdFusion more alive in the last two and a half years
Nolan Erck: 00:19:56 plus two and a half years? I think the modernize or die movement from artists has definitely been a big help. Again, the command box forge box thing has been a big game changer. I think we're not done with it yet, but I think things are getting better about the ColdFusion community knowing that not all of the orders products require a cold box, that you can do things like test box to test your legacy CFML app you can use. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:20:31 well thank Matt. You know,
Nolan Erck: 00:20:32 yeah. That it was a bleeding that's a big, um, a longterm problem in the space. Did they feel like, Oh, anything with the word box in it? Oh, that's, I have to use cold box to benefit from that and a lot of the products, um, that's not true with cold, nothing do a cold box. There are no, there are several of them where if you use cold box that other product, whether it's test box or something else, it will have a couple of pieces of additional functionality in it. But you can use it straight up to test, you know, CF includes and old terrible web apps and whatever else you want to do with it. Um, I think we're getting better at the, the modernize that I think has been a big help. Um, I just want to mention shoutout
Michaela Light: 00:21:13 the, the conference into the box, which is, you know, run by old tests in Houston and now they're going to do one in Latin America or they're planning on doing some initiative in Europe as well. Um, that conference is not just a box conference, you know, half the sessions, there were nothing to do with box stuff. They would do with cold fusion or,
Nolan Erck: 00:21:36 yeah, they're, I, I continually tell people at the end of the box conference is probably the best conference to go to right now for learning how to write modern CFML code. And by bond and I don't mean it has to be a cold box app. Yes, there are a few sessions at the event pertaining to cold box stuff, but they've had like the Ingenex team out there showing how engine X works. They've have the fusion reactor guys, they're demoing what fusion reactor does. Um, there was a talk I think, not I think at end of the box 2018 about like I'm dealing with anxiety and uh, mental health disorders. Yeah. Yeah. Free. I interviewed him on podcast program is get anxious and yeah, it was a lot said about it. You have to make sure you take care of yourself mentally. And it was great to see sessions like that popping up at the conference. You didn't do a session of that conference, but um,
Michaela Light: 00:22:32 um, go, who's Luis's brother? I'm sorry. My brain is just [inaudible] this morning
Nolan Erck: 00:22:37 in Switzerland. Jorge court, case manager, dude, Jorge, well, Hey, yes. Hey Jorge. I think it's his cousin or something, but yeah, that's okay.
Michaela Light: 00:22:48 Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize for miss missed releasing you anyway. He is really, you know, he was at a training session and one of the developers seemed all happy. He was there and then they committed suicide and so he's been on a mission that, you know, help cope [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 00:23:06 let's see what that's off. I didn't know about that.
Michaela Light: 00:23:07 Yeah. Hell yeah. I did a whole Holocaust interview on this. We talked about practical ways to help with that. So I guess there's a whole, um, you know, sometimes in the past developers were a little shy about talking about that feelings or, um, you know, problems going on. And I think that has been a bit of a shift to more openness to talk about this stuff. Um, so I think that's the shift. Maybe that's, you know, related to this or it's going on at the same time. Well, I think that's important because it like if you've, if you're feeling burnt out and depressed about cold fusion, if you don't talk about it, how are you going to change
Nolan Erck: 00:23:46 it, you know? Yeah. Or just burnt out and depressed feeling about anything too, whether it's not because you're using a certain check stack to do your job, but something else. And then the fact that you feel like your job is not fun anymore or not giving you current skills that would just compound a problem happening elsewhere too. And um, yeah, I don't know that it's necessarily related to the, um, the CFLI of revolution, uh, thing. But, um, yeah, we are seeing more, uh, soft skill style sessions added at conferences and, and more of that info just being made generally available to people. Uh, related to that. I think we're also seeing an increase in work at conferences to make sure, um, they're more inclusive and welcoming of everybody. Uh, I know I was talking to you before we started recording about CF camp. That just happened last month.
Nolan Erck: 00:24:41 And one of the nice two of the nice things they did at CF camp were one, they had um, pronouns stickers for our name badges so you could have a he him or she her, uh, sticker on your name tag at the event. And that was helpful. And this year when they picked the speakers for CF camp, they did so with a completely anonymous selection process. So I was in previous years, I don't think because of anyone in doing it intentionally, but in previous years they had the situation where every speaker was, you know, a white male probably over 35 or 40 years old. And this year they said let's mix it up and make sure that we can try to, you know, be more inclusive. Everyone, they have the anonymous speaker selection process and I think there were like 20% women among the speakers at CF campus here and then a C if summit has a pretty good mix of people of different backgrounds, men and women speaking into the box.
Nolan Erck: 00:25:37 I don't know off the top of my head, I think there's, I think there were two women's women that's a bit of a smaller conference. So too that makes it sound tiny. That's still, there's probably maybe 10% 15% of the total speaker list at a conference with, you know, so not 50, 50, but much better than previous events have been before. And so things are headed in the right direction. And um, I think it's good that all of these things are happening at the same time. They can all sort of pull off of each other's momentum and move events forward, move ColdFusion forward, move diversity and development forward at the same time. Make the events more welcoming to everyone included, better session content, things like, yeah, maintaining good mental health and um, along with other events that, um, things that have nothing to do with coffee.
Nolan Erck: 00:26:26 And I'm like we mentioned before, engine X and fusion reactor and all those sorts of things that all make modern coalition and Docker, the dr guys had been at those events a few times. Yeah. They've given lectures and workshops and other developers have just talked about how they use Docker at different um, in different projects or things like search or Mongo DB or Amazon web services pop up very regularly now. Um, and all of which can get tied in with ColdFusion or Lucy and get used for building modern web apps. In fact, in most modern web apps, if you go to a webpage, you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the site if it was built in ColdFusion or something else because the URLs are all, you know, set up with SEO links these days. They don't end in like, you don't go to contact dot CFM anymore, you just go to slash contact and the rest of it's hidden behind the scenes.
Michaela Light: 00:27:17 Often people for security reasons to turn off the header broadcast while the server technology is. So a lot of these, a lot of these sites like built with some other ones out there that say, here's a survey of what sites are running, what technology, they're totally wrong on what technologies they're, and they show, you know, cold fusion at some small percentage where in reality they miss. I mean, I, I am, Brad did this investigation into that technology and some of the other ones and we fed sites that we knew because we'd written them, they were in cold fusion and they said that site came back. This is in Java, this is Dalton net. You know, like guys, your identification staff is not working right and escaping, creating a false perception of the use of cold fusion. Not to mention that like according to an Adobe survey, for every public site that uses cold fusion, there's two to three sites that are intranet or extra national hidden mind. Some firewall. I'm using it and I don't know if you remember the NASA speaker CF summit two years ago saying how NASA uses ColdFusion extensively. None of that is public facing. It's all internal, um, stuff. They have the paths, you know, thousands of employees getting things done, sending missions to Mars and what have you.
Nolan Erck: 00:28:38 I believe it, my first several ColdFusion jobs were all writing intranets and in straight CFML but none of it's publicly visible. They're all, you know, warehouse apps or company company intranet or um, just internal tools I needed for something. And you'd have no way of knowing that. That was a, um, in use.
Michaela Light: 00:29:01 It's like this nice book was the tip, the way you can see the public staff that's identified, but then there's another 90% below the ocean that's doing powerful things. So, um, we, you mentioned, um, improvements in conferences. There've been more conferences in ColdFusion last few years. Um, you know, CF, some India started into the box only started three years ago. I want to say, Oh, just before this, uh, revolution. Um, and uh, CF camp's been improving. See if some of East has grown tremendously in the last few years. I mean, it started with just 30 attendees. I think last year there were 250, 10 days. So
Nolan Erck: 00:29:43 it was really good. Last year I went, I spoke and gave a, I gave a workshop on connecting angular with ColdFusion and we had a full room of, yeah, probably 40 people signed up for the workshop and yeah, the conference had to be at least 200, 250 people. It was a really big well done event. The quality of the sessions had moved forward to not the speakers, not that the speakers had done a bad job in previous years, but the um, the, the talks were moving forward much like they do with other conferences too and showing people at all the conferences, all the modern things you can do. Like Brian Kloss gave a great talk on using ColdFusion with Amazon web services showing how to connect those together and do some amazing things.
Speaker 6: 00:30:26 Um,
Nolan Erck: 00:30:27 yeah, we, so I know we've had a couple of conferences that have called it a day for whatever reason. Recently, like CF objective and NC Def con isn't around anymore.
Speaker 6: 00:30:37 Yeah.
Michaela Light: 00:30:37 You're sort of still on hiatus. I get to, is it Dan who bumped into at CF summit and he wasn't averse to getting it rolling again, maybe in conjunction with another conference.
Nolan Erck: 00:30:49 Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool.
Michaela Light: 00:30:51 Yeah. But he's a busy guy. You know, it's a lot of work to run a conference. I know. I uh, you know, I, um, he had a lot of help from people in the therapeutic theme and speakers, never one them sponsors and he has a lot of work.
Nolan Erck: 00:31:07 Yeah. It's a big deal. But yeah. Next we're saying that we have CF summit East is doing really well and there's now a CF summit, a India that's going as well.
Michaela Light: 00:31:16 Adobe is going to do some do some cold fusion event in Europe I think in coordination with CF camp.
Nolan Erck: 00:31:24 Yeah. I think that were talking about doing something like that together.
Michaela Light: 00:31:27 Yeah. Um, um, and then into the box is having a Latin American conference. Yep. And they talked about European events as well. So a lot of conference excitement and also I think, uh, as well as the inclusivity and diversity of the speakers and attendees. Um, and you know, certainly on the female aspect, I, uh, when I on surveys on this side, at least 30% of copied developments of women, uh, and yet they don't get, they don't speak at conferences as much. They don't even attend conferences as much. Yeah. So shout out to all of female CFLI podcast listeners. Hey, really recommend you attend a conference this coming year.
Nolan Erck: 00:32:16 Yeah, the women's speakers, um, shout out to them too. We've had several that are amazing. I mean, I can't speak on behalf of every speaker, male or female, but like, um, Ooma whose last name? Uh, I'm forgetting it to moment. Uh, she's given a great talk on how to do different types of testing your CFML app at, into the box and at a, she just gave a variation about talk at CF camp in Germany. She's given it at the summit. Um, and that one always goes over tremendously. Well, Alicia, of course too, from the Adobe team, does a really good job getting people excited about new things coming up in ColdFusion and demoing security and talking about performance and all their plans for the future. And,
Speaker 7: 00:32:55 um,
Nolan Erck: 00:32:56 yeah, we'd love to see more, more women at the events and you know, um,
Michaela Light: 00:33:03 have an end and interviewed on the CF alive podcast, a number of writing blogs and yeah, blogging, pleading. Yeah. Ooh, my God. Got to clarify. I'm not totally mangling up your last name there. Um, I, I also did a whole series of four interviews around the me too, uh, TA, you know, time about women in technology and issues, not just attending conferences but just in general, you know, it can be quite a male dominated field and, um, what's the word? Patriarchy, you know, where some women, you know, don't feel they can speak up in meetings or their ideas get put down. And, and you mentioned a new innovation of CF, uh, S um, camp this year about the Q and. A, which I think will help anyone, whether they're female or male, they're just a bit when you speak or they're shy about asking questions, what, what was that innovation?
Nolan Erck: 00:34:01 Oh, yeah. So, um, they did a thing, usually at a conference, we'll have maybe a one hour session. The speaker will talk for 45 or 50 minutes and they'll leave the last five or 10 minutes for questions from the audience. And this year at CF camp they said, okay, you get, I can't remember how long, 45 or 50 minutes for your talk. And then they said, no Q and a when you're done, just say thank you and stop. And then if people want to come ask the speaker questions, they provided an office hours, time and location where basically after your talk you could go stand over by a certain booth out in the um, lobby area of the conference near the vendor booths and people could come up to you in a one on one setting and asked the questions there. And at first I thought that was really odd. I had never heard of that happening before. I didn't know why. So I asked Kai about it. So what's going on? And apparently this is really common at conferences in Europe and Asia. What it does, it does a couple of things. It helps with,
Speaker 7: 00:34:58 um,
Nolan Erck: 00:34:58 often you'll have this happen when you give a talk at the end of say, are there any questions? No hands will go up when it's a full room of people. And then as everyone's leaving, two or three individuals will come trickling up and basically to ask a one on one question that they didn't feel comfortable asking in front of a larger audience for whatever reason, this gives those people
Michaela Light: 00:35:16 cause they don't want to look stupid or they don't like public speaking and [inaudible] and the idea of speaking in front of an audience of a hundred people with terrifying.
Nolan Erck: 00:35:25 Yeah. So it gives those people a safer way to ask the questions without feeling freaked out on the other side too. Sometimes new speakers don't feel comfortable answering a question in a that large, especially when their answer is going to be, you know, I don't know the answer to that. Um, it takes a long time, but speaking in front of crowds to get comfortable with just responding, you know, I don't know. Does anyone else, you know how to answered his or her question and new speakers don't have that ability often. So getting rid of the large crowd, given the office hours, situation, mixed both those, um,
Speaker 5: 00:36:01 okay.
Nolan Erck: 00:36:02 Both those scenarios kind of go away. It also solves the problem of having that jerk in the room that will occasionally, uh, try to ask a random obscure question just to get the speaker to stumble a bit and kind of, you know, people in the audience sometimes like to puff their chest and feel like they know more than the presenter does. And the last questions, like what happens if I wrote code with this library and this bill process on this kind of machine on a Thursday with the full moon, how does it do such and such thing? Just so they can respond and say, Oh, I actually know the answer to that. And you didn't know it. Speaker. Ha ha ha. Well people like that don't go to the one on one office hour sessions because there's no crowd there to, you know, feel like they're being built up with. So that whole scenario goes away entirely too when you do the office hours thing. So um, yeah it was really
Michaela Light: 00:36:52 interesting. Yeah. No it's a great innovation. I hope other conferences pay attention to that and can implement something similar and it just gives you, I mean this happens naturally, like you said at the end of the talk, people come up one on one to ask the speaker questions and that is nice. But it first of all speakers usually quite exhausted after giving a talk. Uh, and secondly it can go into the next speaker's time and set up your next speaker wants to be there setting up and they can't do it cause people have their last big hasn't taken the laptop town. So I think moving out to a separate area is a nice innovation.
Nolan Erck: 00:37:25 It can definitely help with that as well. Yeah, that was one of the things you have camp was really good about doing it this year. I didn't see it previous years but I might've just missed it. They would have people come in when there were 10 minutes left in the session and hold up assignments at 10 and at five minutes someone came in with a five minute sign. So you had the warnings about, you know, wrap it up, wrap it up.
Michaela Light: 00:37:44 Yeah. Cause it's easy to lose track of time when you're speaking, you know, you get so excited doing it or nervous or how would you want to frame it? Yeah, absolutely. I always reframe anxiety into excited cause it's really the same sensation in the body that's tingling in the tummy. You know, your hands might be a bit sweaty, but for me that's like excited. Whereas when I was younger it was, Oh my God, I'm anxious, I need to hide. Um,
Speaker 5: 00:38:12 so
Michaela Light: 00:38:15 I was going to say something else about this, but it'll come back to me in a moment. Um, so any other conference, uh, innovations you've seen in the last years or improvements
Nolan Erck: 00:38:28 it work for splitting up the no, I think there's been a lot of work in the and welcoming everyone and that's moving forward really well. I think, uh, we, we have, we do have different ColdFusion conferences now than they were five years ago, but there's still a decent amount of them in different parts of the world. There is one relatively near most, you know, most tech areas to make something available. Um, I do like the other trend, I guess it is in that an event might be branded a ColdFusion conference, but the amount of content there that works for any technology stack is also growing at these events. Like to use into the box. Again, as an example, the engine X talks in generics could be used for anything. It's a web server, so that's in no way tied to CFML. You could use that for whatever Docker, same thing.
Nolan Erck: 00:39:20 Docker is designed to be, you know, whatever the heck you want it to be. You want a power nine CFML servers, great. Do it. You want a power five elastic search machines. Great. Do that. You can do any combination. That stuff and that kind of, um, bend to the ColdFusion conferences is also increasing. I think there's events where you can learn how to tie it to Amazon web services or, um, search engine optimization tricks that work for anything. Uh, there's been several great talks I've seen lately from Dave Ferguson and Eric, uh, cobs their hubs. Um, yeah, Eric, uh, they both give great talks and like here's tricks to optimize your database. And that all works, whether it's called fusion or not. And I don't know if that's a really an innovation, but I like that that trend is happening more of, okay, yes, this is a cold fusion conference, but we know that people need to know more than just CFML stuff. They didn't know how to do that with angular or elastic search or Docker or whatever. And
Michaela Light: 00:40:24 yeah, new topics. And I'm so relate to that. Um, you know, I've seen more people using modern tools, like even simple things like source control. It's getting rarer and rarer that someone says, Oh, you're, I don't use source control. You know, people are embracing these more than, uh, ecosystem innovations. Um, speaking of learning new things that been several books released on ColdFusion, not just the CF, but what's best seller. Um, but Lewis just released [inaudible] modern CF mail in a hundred minutes, I think if I'm not totally mangling his title up,
Nolan Erck: 00:41:01 that is totally the name. It's where I got it right there.
Michaela Light: 00:41:03 Woo. Right there. Video listeners, see that signed by Lewis? No doubt. Um, you go that at CF summit, right?
Nolan Erck: 00:41:12 I got it at CF. No, I got this at CF camp and Luis was not there this year. He was, he was on a vacation with his wife. So Jorge actually handed me that book. It, it's not signed by anyone, but it's currently sitting here with a page, you know, bent over where I've, uh, polished and reading it for the moment. Um, but it's another good new resource, new book available to show people how to write modern code and modern CFML.
Michaela Light: 00:41:39 And then there's a book about CF and angular, angular. I'm spacing on the exact title, but there was a new edition of that put out. I would have no, that one, I will try and find that. Um, yeah, I noticed that learn with angular seven bootstrapping ColdFusion enterprise something or another enterprise application development by Jeffery Hauser. Oh, okay. Yeah. Version seven, angular seven.
Nolan Erck: 00:42:10 Right on. I didn't know you did that.
Michaela Light: 00:42:12 Yeah, that came out November, 2018 so, uh, I'll put a link to that in the show notes cause um, the, I don't think Jeffrey really promoted it very heavily. Um, or at least I didn't see the promotion. Um, so,
Speaker 3: 00:42:29 um,
Michaela Light: 00:42:32 is good. Um, then also let us not forget the other learning big learning resource for cold fusion that had a total rebound that was released, which is learn CF in a week. Yes. So, um, I interviewed the, some of the guys behind that and um, on the podcast and they've done a lot to modernize it and improve that, how it works. So I'm just looking for when I went, let's see if we, uh, Danny Frederick's type person and call on Stephan, I guess. Sounds like he should be in some, a special German movie.
Nolan Erck: 00:43:17 Carl lives about an hour from me actually. He's down in the Bay area and yeah, super good guy.
Speaker 3: 00:43:23 Okay.
Michaela Light: 00:43:23 So, um, very popular resource, totally free. And you really can learn ColdFusion in the week if you've never done it before. And to be honest, if you haven't touched up your cold fusion skills recently, I think worked doing that, learn, see if the way you're going to learn some new stuff. Um, which brings us onto the next new thing that came out, which was the a and M I don't have the official title for, for the Caucasian certification technical specialist training or something. Adobe just released at CF summit. Yes. And, and I think you were involved in creating that one. You was 21 as a video and
Nolan Erck: 00:43:59 no, I think, I think it's, it's 23 verse 20 some videos, but they're not all an hour in length. So the amount of videos is, I think it's about 10 hours of video. Um,
Nolan Erck: 00:44:11 but there's, yeah, somewhere around 20 or so actual videos and they range in length from like 10 to 45 or 50 minutes long. Um, and uh, yeah, so we, uh, Adobe and my team partnered together. Uh, we wrote up a list of okay, what content needs to go in these videos. Uh, I wrote the scripts and all the code demos, recorded all the videos. Adobe was kind enough to assist with that process. They did a bunch of the editing and a book in the videos together and tidying them up for me. Uh, and then we worked with Damien whose last name I'm blanking on again. I'm sorry. Damien and Brian sappy. Uh, I think there were one or two other people as well. There was a team of a handful of us that wrote the coefficient certification tests. So the idea with the project is people can sign up to become coefficient certified.
Nolan Erck: 00:45:04 They can watch the 10 or so hours of video and then at the end of that process they can go to one of the ColdFusion conferences and take an all day workshop. On the point of the workshop is two things. One is basically we spend a majority of the day reviewing what was in the videos. We'll go over. Okay. There was a video on functions and here's how functions work and here's what the argument's scope does and what the VAR scope does. Any questions. And it gives people a chance to ask a question or two about what may or may not be in the videos. We cover everything there. And then at the end of that day, the students have the last hour of the day to take the core fusion certification test. And if they pass the test, then they get certified in cold fusion
Michaela Light: 00:45:47 and a very snazzy logo for their LinkedIn profile.
Nolan Erck: 00:45:50 Various dental over LinkedIn. They get a very nice frame certificate. They get a hoodie that says cold fusion certification specialist on it or something to that effect. Um, it's very, very warm. If it's the form of study I owned by a wide margin, I have to be careful when I take it with me. Sometimes I'll just, I like to grab hoodies and when I leave the house and this one I'll grab it in like, Oh my God, I'm sweating. Like, what's going on? Oh, I have my IWT on. It's, it's super warm. Um, and uh, yeah, so that's out and available now,
Michaela Light: 00:46:19 isn't there, isn't there a listing of certified developers on the Adobe site as well?
Nolan Erck: 00:46:23 I believe so. Um, I wasn't involved in putting the list together or putting that on the web, so, uh, I'm not positive if that's gone live or what the plan is for that. I think
Michaela Light: 00:46:36 I interviewed Alicia all about this and I think that was one of the benefits. I mean told her that the several reasons for having that certification, one is to help people modernize their ColdFusion skills and to demonstrate that to their employer. Um, but also is to help with hiring, you know, make it easier to hire good ColdFusion developers, um, help people get ahead of the pack and getting a new job or freelancing gig if that's what they do. So,
Nolan Erck: 00:47:02 yeah, so, and when we have that, um, out there again, they used to be a ColdFusion certification back in the CF six or seven days, and then over the years it just sort of out say fate was the last one. Okay. So we figured out, okay, I think I took it for a six, six or seven and uh, it just kinda faded out and wasn't a thing anymore. And yeah, Adobe contacted me last year and said, can you help us put this together? Is that, of course we've got that up and running now. So the uh, yeah, the task cover is kind of what I would call the fundamentals of modern CFML development. So you're not gonna learn cold box, you're not going to learn a framework. One, it doesn't cover a bunch of the design patterns that covers MVC a little bit and it covers, um, Oh, inherent some basic old concepts like inheritance and composition are in there, but things like, Oh, the decorator pattern or the, uh, publish the Hollywood pattern, things like that are not in the videos.
Nolan Erck: 00:48:09 But, um, so it gets you right up through an intro to MVC itself and then it kind of stops there. There's talk of maybe revamping it a little bit more, adding some more stuff. Uh, in 2020, I don't know of any official that was just kind of a hallway discussion that we had about it. Like I'll be great to add a couple more things. I said. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Uh, there haven't been any contract signed or anything like that yet though. So I don't know if that's gonna officially happen on, I would love to see it happen. I would love to see more content go into the videos and more stuff be made available to everyone. But yeah, if you can get certified again in Adobe ColdFusion and it's all current modern techniques, the stuff that we mentioned earlier that the nine to five programmers typically aren't aware of.
Nolan Erck: 00:48:52 Things like even simple stuff like the shorthand syntax for making an array. You don't have to type array, new parentheses, parentheses anymore. You can just use square brackets like you can in JavaScript. We've got things like closures and um, number functions like you have in Java and Java script and various other languages. And that's all available now. And we cover that in the videos and show how those work. And, um, and all of the videos are, uh, all the code samples and the videos are CF script. They're not tag-based there's a few references to the tags where it makes sense to do so. But I'd say like 90% of the code is all modern CF script style syntax too. Cause I know that's been another thing that longtime CF developers have shied away from. They don't quite understand what the scripty syntax is for or they haven't seen good examples of what to do with it yet. So now we have demos of all that to do in the videos for everyone.
Michaela Light: 00:49:48 It's the modern way of programming and also because it's very close to JavaScript can Titan will be fully compatible with it and the CF 2020 release, it means the people who know Java's hurt, which let's face it, is every full fact developer on the planet. Right? Instantly coding cold fusion.
Nolan Erck: 00:50:05 Yeah. That's the idea. Like make it look as much like the other programming languages as we can so that it's easier to transition from one to the other. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:50:14 but it's also a better way to write a lot of code. I mean there still is a place for CF tax.
Nolan Erck: 00:50:19 There is and I still use tags for certain things too. Like my view layer in my app is all tags because it just flows more nicely with the HTML. Yeah. Switching between HTML and script feels too much like writing PHP and that's a, a slower workflow and just doesn't work well. So I use tags for all the my view layer stuff, but anything talking to the database service layers, controllers, any of that stuff that's all script whenever possible these days. Um, but anyway, yeah, we are talking about all that in the certification, uh, training process. We just did the, the first round of getting people certified at the ColdFusion summit this last, what was that? October and uh, that went really well. Yeah, they opened one all day workshop, I think it was a capped at 40 students and they said, well, let's see how well the cells and it sold really quickly and sold out. So they opened a second session. Same thing happen. It's sold out. And I think when all of a sudden done, we had three pretty much sold out rooms doing that certification. We had 120 or so people show up in Vegas to get certified in cold fusion 2018 and about 90% of them passed the test too. So a whole lot of people came out away from that I think pretty satisfied and now they have a nice certificate to show that they know what they're doing.
Michaela Light: 00:51:36 It has amazing, that's a total revitalization of what's going on in learning CF and certification. So let's talk about some of the new tools that have been released in the last years. A lot of exciting stuff. I mean the being updates for cold box and CF wheels, I'm not sure a framework one had not paid or not, but it's certainly still being actively
Nolan Erck: 00:51:57 still be active. There was a little bit of a transition. Sean Corfield sort of handed the reins over to myself and a couple of other folks. Oh, we didn't know that. Yeah, we've just been busy with other things and haven't updated it much. But I, I plan on, I've got a couple of demos in the works for it and uh, uh, Stephen I know has, you know, answered some questions on the forum and such for that lately too. So it's still there. Yeah. Excellent. And then, uh,
Michaela Light: 00:52:22 on security from a found P pre tag and found Yeo release fixed Meda. And I'm a P he has a name for this, but the web application firewall thing, um, that he has and that's on top of the hack. ICF
Nolan Erck: 00:52:36 are, you're talking about see fusion [inaudible] no, I know. Huge. God. Thank you. Yes, yes.
Michaela Light: 00:52:48 Um, and then fusion react to has had several releases and of course they released their cloud version as well in the last few years. So
Nolan Erck: 00:52:55 yeah, there've been a ton of stuff.
Michaela Light: 00:52:57 And, and I guess we should mention too, Adobe released the performance monitor too or whatever they call it, PMT. Uh, that's also another co monitor and then autists like went on a flurry of new releases and new products. I'm not sure which new box products have been released in the last two and a half years, but I sort of feel wow, box was new and test box was new.
Nolan Erck: 00:53:22 Um, they definitely put out new versions of wire box and test box. I don't remember how long those had been available overall, but there's, yeah, there was a new rev of test box that came out Oh, within the last two months. Uh, wire box at some point in the last year. They rev wire box. Um, yeah, there've been several of those content box. Their CMS engine has gotten a couple of updates as well. Uh, the cold box framework itself is on version five dot. Something now that's been getting regular updates. Uh, I believe I just saw a post from Brad or a tweet from Brad maybe two or three days ago about a new command box stuff is in the works as well. He's updating some of the internal libraries that power command box giving that um, a pretty good behind the scenes cleanup forge box. Just had some updates come out. Oh, I want to say a week ago. A yeah. Those guys have been really busy with Torres.
Michaela Light: 00:54:19 See, very, very, I don't know how they get any work done with the open source stuff. They do. Yeah.
Nolan Erck: 00:54:24 Oh, another P fry tag item that's come out is CF script.me, uh, back to our conversation about how people are using tags. But CF script is the more modern way to write code. It can be a super tedious process to take an old file full of CFML tags and convert that over to script. You don't have to do that now. You [email protected]. I think that's it. Uh, the website paste your tag version into the site and it will convert everything for you over to CF script.
Speaker 3: 00:54:53 Wow.
Nolan Erck: 00:54:54 Yeah. Genius. Yeah. And that's free. You just copy your code over, paste it, save the up and you're done. You don't have to pay a monthly fee or anything.
Michaela Light: 00:55:01 [inaudible] and uh, his picks and ADA thing looks for security flaws and new code that was written as a service. You know, headless lambed our app as I understand it.
Speaker 3: 00:55:12 So, uh,
Nolan Erck: 00:55:14 I don't know how that's written behind the scenes. I know he took some of the work from the heat,
Michaela Light: 00:55:21 he spoke about it into the box and explain how he did it as this modern Lambda, you know, headless app. The Tony. Yeah. So the server isn't always running. It only fires up when, whenever a request is made.
Nolan Erck: 00:55:37 Interesting. There's so much. Yeah. Pete and the artist guys, the family, Oh guys aren't, we're just guys that just, I don't know when any of them sleep, they get so much stuff done
Michaela Light: 00:55:48 well around the ASP in the founder CEO thing isn't there as well? I've never heard of anyone else [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 00:55:53 I think it's mostly him. I, I don't know if he has a team to help him or, or not, but
Michaela Light: 00:55:58 I've never heard the way it does. Maybe it does.
Nolan Erck: 00:56:01 Oh, he's got a family and you know, he's a busy guy. He gets a lot of things done though. It's awesome.
Michaela Light: 00:56:05 Yeah. Um, also autis, you know, announced their four year roadmap of all their products. So not only if they release new versions, new products, but they said, here's what we're planning to add over the next four years. A lot of exciting new features they're targeting there. So, uh, I guess the following the footsteps of Adobe's multi-year product plans, so a great, they're doing that. Speaking of Adobe, I mean not only with the performance manager and security, um, you know, auto lockdown, uh, wish you could pull a Quayside product. Um, also they released the API manager. Yeah. So
Nolan Erck: 00:56:45 yeah. [inaudible] yeah. And that comes with CF enterprise, I think it is. Um,
Michaela Light: 00:56:52 yeah, I'm a little short unsure. It only comes through enterprise or you get it with standard too, but
Nolan Erck: 00:56:59 probably at the suite of products
Speaker 4: 00:57:03 [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 00:57:04 um, speaking of Adobe, not only, you know, Oh, they, you know, sponsored all these cold fusion conferences and that produce their own conferences, but they also, last year they started going to non ColdFusion conferences to reach out to a new potential ColdFusion developers. So they weren't dev week in Oakland, California, and they were the national, uh, association of government web developers or whatever, exactly that web conferences and they're planning next year to be on some water, a cold fusion, long cold fusion conferences to get the word out and cold fusion. And also to meet people that kind of used to do cold fusion and maybe stop doing it and to say, Hey, you guys have missed out on an amazing change in transformation in ColdFusion land. Um, both the language itself and all the ecosystem. So, uh, hats off to Adobe for doing that. And if anyone has a suggestion of conferences, they should go to, um, you know, let us know in the comments or drop an email.
Nolan Erck: 00:58:07 I think Brad wood from artists did a similar thing too. He went to a couple of conferences this year that were not cold fusion events, but he went and demoed CFML and command box and some of the things in that space. And um, I w I want to say he went to dev nexus. I might be totally wrong on that, but I um, I know he was looking at doing some non CFML events as well.
Michaela Light: 00:58:32 Yeah, I know the [inaudible] guys went to, I think they went to some Java event and um, cause of course I, you know, some of their tools work with other languages too. So, yeah, those fusion reactor for that matter, any Java, JBM type language like scaler or some of the other ones whose names elude me. Um,
Speaker 4: 00:58:55 okay.
Michaela Light: 00:58:57 Also, you know, with the cold fusion, uh, releasing is those, uh,
Speaker 4: 00:59:05 okay.
Michaela Light: 00:59:05 A [inaudible] performance increase,
Michaela Light: 00:59:10 they go sit on a lot of work behind it. And this was like without any changes to your code? No, I, they do a lot of, um, what do you call it? They have like a test suite of people give them copies of their Caucasian when take, when they have problems. So it's part of the QA for the bug [inaudible] but also for performance reasons. They've taken like whole apps and like see, okay, how can we tweak the cold fusion engine to make it run this, this code faster, whether it's modern code or legacy code. So, uh, that's a big, uh, improvement. And then there's the whole Lucy initiative that's really, you know, they released Lucy fide and they're working on Lucy six. Yup. Um, and that's helped fire the whole move to containerization. Um, you know, both with c'mon box letting you fire up copies of Adobe, ColdFusion and Lucee without having to do any lation, um, work.
Michaela Light: 01:00:03 And also with Lucy, you know, having a much better licensing model in the cloud. In other words, they don't, you know, it's open source so they don't charge your license. So if you spin up 20 copies of Lucy server, you don't have to worry about legality of doing that. Um, cold fusion, moving towards having a paper, whatever paper and it'll pay per hour model. So they're going to have that state of 2020, um, which is critical for being able to, you know, have a containerized, um, scalable solution in the cloud. So, um, let's see. And speaking of CF 2020, you know, I, can you see the tool they gave on that CF summit,
Nolan Erck: 01:00:50 um, summit, it's all been a blur of travel and jet lag and conferences. I know I saw the talk Kishore gave, I think it was at summit. I don't think it was at CF camp. Yeah, I think I saw the one he gave it summit about new things coming up. Yeah.
Michaela Light: 01:01:05 So, you know, multicloud support, containerization, lot of new language features. Um, you know, [inaudible] is the new VP of or director of um, software development on, in cold fusion. Um, he gave a keynote talk on that nine feet on the podcast. Very excited to see where cold patients going in their eyes. It's an ambitious thing, but basically it's, it's looking at ColdFusion fusion, taking over that cloud programming space cause it will be so easy to create cloud apps using it. Um, so I'm very excited to see that come out next year. We don't know the exact release date. It's like a secret to that Toby. Right?
Nolan Erck: 01:01:46 Yeah. They've got some really nice features. Um, kind of on all layers in fish and plan for the future. As a developer. I like a lot of the language constructs that they add things like we're finally getting no support and they added the abstract keyword I think in 2018. Uh, there's more just more generally O friendly stuff that lets you write code closer to something like Java. Um, with your CFML stuff. And as a developer who's written a lot of, you know, C plus plus code in the past and things like that. I like those Oh features. I want more of them in a my ColdFusion space. But those are also not things that I can usually charge my clients. Um, they're not rather, uh, to set a different way, but not things I can go to my clients with and say, Hey, you should upgrade your version of ColdFusion so that I can use the abstract keyword that doesn't correlate to them making any more money.
Nolan Erck: 01:02:40 Whereas things like moving them into the cloud and adding better performance, better security, um, being able to do new and better, maybe cheaper or more scalable infrastructure ideas, those things I can more easily translate for them. Okay, you spend this money now and here's how your server costs go down or here's how your site performs better, or whatever. The, that kind of aspect of it is. Uh, and that stuff is what I usually can, you know, tell my clients about and say, we recommend you upgrade because you will benefit in these ways. And, uh, there's a nice balance of both of those types of features coming in, the new versions of cold fusion that I'm seeing right now. So, um, yeah, I hope it all comes out really well and, and we, you know, and everything plays nicely together and we get to upgrade all of our servers and everything just works. Famous last words,
Michaela Light: 01:03:31 I guess we should give a shout out for productivity in cold fusion that isn't new in the two, two and a half years. Uh, see if live revolution going. But suddenly Adobe has been focusing on that, that their mantra, this last sightsee of summit was performance productivity and security and cold fusion hits out of the park and all three of those areas. So, um, you know, it's rapid application development is fast performing code. It's scalable and it's secure back. Um, I looked through that, the CV data on the security of different iLab web languages and you know, how many instances they've had and they zero errors helped. You should actually came out as the most secure of those. So it's more secure. Uh, don't net or Java or PHP, you know, all these other languages. Um, and yet sometimes I feel it was a little bit of insecurity in, in the ColdFusion community cause we every time Adobe announces a new security hole as being fixed, you know, people freak out. I maybe they should freak out a little bit cause they should be applying that whole fixed. Surely they don't. And until those listening who are running versions of cold fusion that have gone end of life, which um, includes CF nine and CF 10 and, and I think it's year 11,
Nolan Erck: 01:04:49 I think 11 just got end of life now too. Yes.
Michaela Light: 01:04:51 And applied. So none of those get hot fixes anymore. If you're running any of those, it's just a disaster waiting to happen on the security front. Yeah. Um, so anyway, I think with being more emphasis on security and maybe that's not in the last two and a half years, I think Adobe's been doing that. Lucy has been doing it quite a number of years and I know Adobe has a security saw. It's like their only job is to make sure this is totally secure. Um, and all the internal engineers get trained in how to write secure code. And if there is a security instance, it's like a, like a red alert on Starship enterprise. They kind of, you know, the whole management team is involved until that security issue is resolved, resolved. So they take it incredibly seriously.
Nolan Erck: 01:05:36 Yeah. So [inaudible]
Michaela Light: 01:05:39 let's, let's just end this by talking about how the ColdFusion community has changed and also look at what we're looking forward to next year. So I think it's been a more positive atmosphere in the ColdFusion community, both the conferences and online. What have you noticed?
Nolan Erck: 01:05:54 No, I think it's definitely been a positive community. I, I don't think I'm, I don't know, I feel like if you look in the right spots, if there's always been positive, uh, things happening in there, it's not been completely negative, you know, anywhere ever, which is good. Uh, I think,
Speaker 5: 01:06:13 okay.
Nolan Erck: 01:06:14 Generally people are
Speaker 5: 01:06:16 [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 01:06:17 trying to move forward maybe more than they were, I don't know, three, four, five years ago. There's maybe less resistance in some conferences to doing things the modern way or we're just getting better about educating the community. Sometimes
Michaela Light: 01:06:32 people who behave negatively in the past have either removed themselves from the CF community will make behave
Nolan Erck: 01:06:39 true. And to me, and I'd been, I've, I've run into one or two people over the years that maybe, um, they seemed like other, I don't think that person's, you know, the most social of, uh, presenters. But yeah, for the most part everyone's super nice in the community and willing to help out. And, um, I know when I first started going to coefficient conferences, I think the first one I went to was CF objective in Minneapolis and I had just started my consulting business, didn't really know any people other than I knew names of blogs that I read regularly, but I wasn't friends with any of these people. I just knew these are the websites I go to to get questions answered. And uh, there was an event, I think we all went to go watch what was then the new star Trek movie one night.
Nolan Erck: 01:07:22 And I said, Oh, go meet in the hotel lobby at five o'clock or whatever. We're going to carpool over to, um, the theater. So I went over there and met, I just said, you're here for the movie. Yeah. Hi, I'm Nolan. And much to my surprise, the first response I heard from someone was, Oh, Nolan ERG. Oh, I use your slides on CF components to teach all my new junior developers how to do [inaudible] programming in cold fusion. Hi, I'm, and that turned out to be Jason Dean. I had no idea who he was by looking at him until then I'd read the name like, Oh yeah, I read your blog all the time. You write 12 robots.com there's great stuff on there. And I just ended up being in a van to go see the movie with Jason. And um, I ended up being like Ben to Dell and Dan Vega and a handful of other folks in there that I knew the names of, but I'd never met any of them before in person. And I've heard other people say before too that like their, they get a little, for lack of a better phrase, star struck about that spend a dollar that's, you know, Tim Cunningham or whoever these people that like they ran all the blogs that we read and learn all of our stuff from. And uh,
Nolan Erck: 01:08:22 the coffees and communities are really just people that are super nice and want to share their info with everyone. And there's really no egos. I don't think among um, the people that are regularly blogging or speaking at conferences or running podcasts or on podcasts. It's all people that are just super nice and like making things and contributing and helping to teach people. And um, I think so. I think it's always been that way. But there's definitely been more of that happening lately. Just more diverse people doing that. More women that are getting a chance to speak at conferences and things like that. And just more podcasts. I mean this one's been going on for a hundred episodes now. That's amazing. Um,
Speaker 4: 01:09:02 Oh,
Michaela Light: 01:09:03 it is amazing. Thanks for not guests like you helped achieve that. And thanks to myself and the rest of the terror tech team, what's out there all cost. So I'm gets it up on iTunes and YouTube, Stitcher and all the other places it goes to and makes the transcripts. So we have a way to scan through the episode without having to listen to it, reused into it in the future if we don't wish to. Some of us are not oral people, some of us like to read. Um, so, um, you know, just give a shout out in the CFO alive book was a, um, [inaudible] suggested community guidelines section in there. And I think I'm going to make a blog post out of that and uh, promote it a bit more cause, um, I think it would help to put in writing how we, you know, how we like to behave in the best version of ourselves in the CF community. So, uh, um, I'll, I'll put that out and put a link to that. And then, so, um, 2020 end of the decade is coming up in a few months and new decade is starting. So what are you looking forward to, to, uh, all the CFLI revolution, uh, and ColdFusion modernization
Nolan Erck: 01:10:24 in 2020? I'm looking forward to, Oh man, I'm looking forward to a bunch of stuff. I guess we're going to have CF version 2020 coming out. That'll be good to see, get released. And uh, you know, hopefully everyone, um, likes the features that go into that and we see a lot of positive traction off of, off of those. I'm certain we'll see probably 75 or 80 new products from the artist's team coming out and making everything, you know,
Michaela Light: 01:10:52 they only have like a dozen box products. I mean, you know,
Nolan Erck: 01:10:57 now, but I mean that's, we're talking maybe.
Michaela Light: 01:11:00 Yeah. They might have have 70 or 80. Yeah,
Nolan Erck: 01:11:03 they've got a whole second conference now. That didn't, wasn't a thing last year. There's a Latin America into the box now
Michaela Light: 01:11:09 and the European ones coming. Yeah.
Nolan Erck: 01:11:11 European something or other. I didn't know that either. So that'll be fun to see what we send out. Slat of CF summit capture you on video. Oh, nice. I'm so behind on, so on the uh, the modernize or die podcast. I listen to those. I'm in order just because I've got these YouTube playlist that I do that, but the moderate, the CFLI podcasts, like photo of pick random order to listen to them. Um, I watched the one with Dominic from like a year and a half ago earlier this week because I was looking for something to about preside. I'm like, Oh Dominic, that's right. He's got a podcast episode on there. I'll watch that now. And so I don't watch the CFLR ones in sequence. I need to be better about doing that. I watched them sort of in random fashion. I think that's fine. There's no particular order, but I missed things like Louis announcing Oh, a European conferences and stuff that was on our YouTube channel.
Nolan Erck: 01:12:01 Okay. Yes. We have a terror attack you see after YouTube channel. Cool. Anyway, what else are you looking forward to? Oh man. Um, camp has got plans to move forward with that and do more things. I'd like to see that continue to grow things. It's a great conference and I am glad to see the improvements they made this year to both sides of the conference. Um, inclusivity of everyone. The new hotel at now is really nice. They've moved that conference to I think three or four different venues over the history of the event because they keep outgrowing the previous space. Right now they're at a great, uh, I think it's a Hilton Hilton or Marriott hotel in Freising.
Nolan Erck: 01:12:47 Yeah. And uh, it's great. So they have the conference is at the same hot, it's actually at the hotel where the speakers stay so you have the ability to, to go back and forth to your room real easily if you want to drop off your back or whatever. Um, that has not been the case at the previous couple of, uh, locations. So it's kind of a nice improvement now of where they're at. I like to see that conference continued to grow. Uh, Miura has got version seven dot. Two that's going to be released pretty soon. I know that they're really excited about all the new features that they put into Miro seven too. So it'll be nice to see that get released and um, put out into the wild. They've been doing a lot of work to make Nero run really nicely as a headless CMS.
Nolan Erck: 01:13:30 You can power like your view JS apps with it or angular or whatever else you want with it. And uh, I haven't looked at the latest version of Myuran and a little while, so it'll be nice to see what they put into 72 and, um, check out some of the stuff coming out from them. Oh man. What else? I'd love to see, you know, the coefficient certification stuff continue and hopefully, um, Adobe and ITT Europe, I believe. Yeah, I think so. We're talking about, there's been talk of a few things. Yeah. But I haven't, um, I don't know what their plans are as far as like adding more videos and more content if they want to do like a 2.0 version of the, um, certification later. That includes things we talked about. Some stuff like the certification right now does not include some of what I would call the, um, niche market tags.
Nolan Erck: 01:14:19 Things like talking to a Microsoft exchange server. Not everyone needs to do that. So there's no test question in the certification about how do you talk to an exchange server. But for the people that need to know how to do that, um, they need to know how to do that really well. So it'd be nice to see sort of an add on certificate for that. Maybe you can get certified in general ColdFusion use and you can get certified with a specialty in talking to exchange servers or a specialty in, um, generating PDF documents or spreadsheets or, and things like that. So, um, yeah, I'd be nice to see what Adobe does in 2020 with not just called fusion version 2020, but the certification and training plans in the future in general and all that stuff. So,
Speaker 4: 01:15:01 um,
Michaela Light: 01:15:02 very cool. I mean, also I just want to give a shout out to Adobe. Aleesha does our kind of roadshow where she goes to different cities and talks to key companies and organizations that use in ColdFusion. And autists does roadshow and they did their kind of develop a week thing or forget what they call it. They,
Nolan Erck: 01:15:19 yeah. Or just developer week.
Michaela Light: 01:15:21 Well, just develop a weekly webinars, all kinds of cool stuff. I'm working on a new book on cold fusion, uh, uh, cold fusion rocks, which is designed for CEOs who either have left hope fusion and why they might want to come back or whites and lunch stay or why someone who's never used cold fusion, you should look at using it. So looking at it more from the it management point of view, um, and then I think Lucy is due for an update release in 2020s. So, um, so I don't see what they put in there. So I, I'm just gonna come to the question I always ask guests is, ask yourself this, what would it make to make ColdFusion even more alive in 2020?
Nolan Erck: 01:16:02 Oh man. Even more alive in 2020. We've got so much stuff in the works right now.
Speaker 4: 01:16:09 [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 01:16:10 that's kind of a tough, I'm not sure. Like we have really good podcasts now that are coming out with, with content. There's really good,
Speaker 4: 01:16:16 yeah.
Nolan Erck: 01:16:17 YouTube videos, conferences on multiple continents now. I think we need just to kind of keep the momentum going would be a general statement about it. Like keep, um, there's space for all of those things. So there's a space for the frameworks that are being developed on the podcasts and the blog posts that are out there and the training and everything and like, um, I feel like it's, you know, maybe it just keeping the momentum going to those things for 2020 would be what we need to do. Put it, you know, the, the book and all the stuff that the other platforms do. And I don't think they view it as a revival. They just view it as like, well, after you deal with a platform that's alive is you have people that blog about it and podcast out and things on it. So maybe if we do another year or two of pushing things, that'll just be the new norm for everyone in ColdFusion land of just, well, yeah, of course. It's, of course there are blog posts everywhere and podcasts everywhere in training and stuff because it's a modern, you know, tech stack. Just like anything else. I don't know if it was any one area that I think it's lacking in right now. The resources are there if you, you know, if you need them in whatever capacity or platform you're looking for.
Michaela Light: 01:17:30 Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I just want to call out some of the listeners. I, you know, some people listening to this are blogging and tweeting or making tools or sharing cool stuff. They're doing a cold fusion. Um, and I know there are some people listening who, you know, maybe still see it someone else's job to make ColdFusion alive. And I just want to tell you, your ColdFusion fusion needs you to help you be the change you want to see in the world. If you won't call to be more alive, everyone listening, he can do some small thing, even if it's just tweeting about something cool. He didn't call fusion or retweeting something else you saw or helping someone else in the ColdFusion community. Um, and just being more visible and being proud that you use cold fusion. You know, we need to get rid of this life with shame where you don't own up to doing stuff in hope fusion for fear of being beaten up by a band of roving.net developers.
Michaela Light: 01:18:28 Um, and you know, we, I think just be proud that we use competition. Maybe even if we're allowed to put it on our website, you know, built with cold fusion. I don't know, do you remember the Aaliyah days? They used to have that little logo built with ColdFusion or something that had the lightning bolt and what have you on that? I think we need to recreate something like that. And also, although the CF Slack channel list is responsive and, and people chat a lot in there, it's not searchable. All the content goes away after a certain period of time because it's free version of Slack. I just want to put out to people, you know, why don't we post our questions into some public searchable forum? Like, uh, how about stack overflow, for example, great platform upvoting your content strategy discussions. And more importantly, organizations like garden and research and porous research look up places like stack overflow to terminate the languages alive or dead. And if they don't see any ColdFusion posts on there, they kind of assume that no one's talking about it, which is not true because they're all in the Slack channel talking about it. But yeah, I think to be honest, the time has come for us to be proud to be ColdFusion developers and um,
Speaker 8: 01:19:42 [inaudible]
Nolan Erck: 01:19:43 I'm going to re reframe my answer. The thing we needed to do to make ColdFusion alive in 2020 is to get rid of the Slack channel. Sorry, I'm not a fan. I like Slack for internal team projects. When I need to talk to my developers about what we're doing today, it's great. But yeah, for, for the reasons you just mentioned where the questions get answered, but then those answers fade out because the content from the channel, it gets purged every X number of weeks or whatever it is. You're right. That stuff would have much more longterm benefit if it were posted on a forum, like a Google forum or a stack overflow board or anything that can get picked up by the search engines and archived and be made available to future developers and researchers that happened [inaudible] researchers that come in and, and look at how much activity there is talking about a certain language to figure out whether that language is still being used or not.
Nolan Erck: 01:20:34 Um, none of that, none of those benefits happen when we do it all in a Slack channel. They do happen when you post in public forums. Um, I've always been kind of surprised that the select channel is pushed as much as it is for support questions for, uh, a language because for those reasons, it doesn't make any sense to ask a question in a forum where your answer will vanish in two months and you'll force new people to ask it again and other people to re answer it. Just put it all in a, a message board somewhere. Um, a Google forum event or something like that, uh, stack overflow or whatever. Um,
Michaela Light: 01:21:13 I think stack Overflow's the, the one a lot of other languages use and certainly that's where Gartner is one of the places they look, uh, to see as a language vital and alive. So I would add it from my use of it for other languages or other topics. It seems to work pretty good. And it's written by, um, the views about people, you know, that really talented developers. It's written to be good for development stuff. So I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel when the we already out there, you know?
Nolan Erck: 01:21:44 Oh yeah, absolutely. It's, I'm not, I'm not knocking stack overflow. If anything, I'm knocking Slack because I don't think that's the right platform for question for this. Yeah. Stack overflow works fine and like post them there. I mentioned Google forums just because there are a few Google forums for things like the command box, a product. There's one from your developers. A, I know there used to be one for like general O programming in CFML. I'm not sure if I wanted to still around or not. There's a, but there's several of them. Yeah. Like, no, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. We can certainly use the forums that are out there, but I think yeah, we should be encouraging people to post their questions there and to the other side of that, we should encourage people that are um, moderators or whatever they're called on stack overflow that answered the questions to answer the questions in a professional manner.
Nolan Erck: 01:22:32 One of the problems we have, not really specific to any forum or platform in cold fusion is we still have a lot of developers that don't know the modern way to do things. They're still writing code using things like the CF form tags or CF includes for everything. And what we'll see sometimes is a person will say, Hey, I have a CF form and it's got three CF and puts in it. How do I do X, Y, Z thing? My opinion is the correct answer to that is here's how you do XYZ thing, but moving forward, just FYI, CF form is not really supported anymore. It's kind of bad for these reasons. I would recommend when you get to a stopping point, you look at pulling that form out and replace it with a plain HTML form with Java script or a server side validation or something like that for X, Y, Z reasons.
Nolan Erck: 01:23:18 How would you answer their question about CFM put and then give the next steps in the right direction. But what we see a lot on stack overflow or wherever is people get kind of snotty with our answers when someone will say, how do I do this thing with CF input? The response they'll get is, Oh, well you shouldn't use CF input. Well that is unhelpful to the person who's, you know, stuck using CF input for whatever reason. They need to know how to do the thing. Even if you don't like to tell that answer or you don't think it's the cool answer to say, here's how you do it. That person needs that answer right now. So we, we should give them, here's your answer. But as part of the answer, move forward in this other direction. You'll save a lot of headaches later. Um, and I wouldn't just encourage people
Michaela Light: 01:23:59 that's part of these copays and community guidelines that I put in the CFL. Like one of the points in there was be respectful and courteous and all your interactions derogatory or insulting language is not tolerated. Just to quote from that and another point in that it's related to give you a fellow fellow CF as the benefit of the doubt or a quotes beneficial reading because in some communities, and I think this has been true in the Caucasian community in the past, people make a sport out of picking apart what people ask or comment and really we want to help people be the best they can be in their cultivation development.
Nolan Erck: 01:24:32 Agreed. Yeah, exactly. Because we're things like we are talking about what can we do to make the product more alive. If you have somebody who's maybe new or behind the times with cold fusion and they ask a question about how do I do this thing with CF input, if the response they get back is helpful, well here's how you did that thing and here's resources for how to make your app better. When you have a little bit more downtime later on, here's how to use HTML tags to make a form and here's how to do that. Same thing with, I don't know, CSS or a jQuery plugin or how to write a CF custom tag to do it or whatever. That developer is going to go, wow, I've got a really good short term answer. I can fix my bug today and I have a nice to do list item for when I build version two of my app.
Nolan Erck: 01:25:10 I can pull this out and use this nice code snippet that somebody gave me about how to build a regular HTML form instead. Cool. That person is going to be more interested in contributing again to the ColdFusion community. Even if that person's contributions are just going to be asking questions for another couple of months until they know enough to answer some questions, they're still going to be interested in doing something. If that same person asks the question, how do I do this thing with the CF input and the response to get back is, Oh, well it's stupid. Don't you see if input? They're probably not going to be as psyched to ask questions in that forum again. They're going to go, well, I tried using cold fusion, but the people that I, when I get stuck, the people in the forums are mean. The people in the Ruby forum were nicer, so I switched to Ruby or whatever. And that kind of thing happens. People don't like to think so, but it can be a factor, especially for people just starting out in development. Um, and
Michaela Light: 01:26:03 it's not just the original poster or ask the question. It's other people who are looking in that forum reading that. I'm not going to ask a question if that's what happens.
Nolan Erck: 01:26:13 Yeah, exactly. If they're going to, if I'm going to get torn to shreds, I'm not going to do and not going to talk to people in that forum anymore. They're going to bail and do something else. So,
Speaker 7: 01:26:23 um,
Michaela Light: 01:26:23 all right. Let's see. Nice Soma forums listening. All right, well I think we should wrap this episode up. I think we've got a world record on the length of a live podcast episode. If people want to reach you online, how should they do that?
Nolan Erck: 01:26:37 Uh, they can find [email protected]. They can also find me on Twitter at South of Shasta. Uh, let's see what else? Those are probably the best ways to reach me right now
Michaela Light: 01:26:47 and people can find [email protected]. That's only one hour and terror tech. And we're on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. Uh, TerraTech CF is usually the handle. Um, so thanks everyone for listening and congrats to all of us. Hey Pam, about that for a a hundred episodes. Happy birth DCF alive revolution, Viva, elaborate evolution. I see sometimes, say.
