Find the show notes and download the episode here.
Michaela Light 0:00
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Eric Peterson. And we're talking about CF casts behind the scenes. We're going to learn what is in CF casts all the cool ColdFusion stuff in there, why He created it, and some other interesting stuff in ColdFusion land and CF casts. Welcome, Eric.
Eric Peterson 0:20
Hey, thanks for having me.
Michaela Light 0:22
You're welcome. And for those of you don't know, Eric is a CFML, and JavaScript developer, he works at audit solutions. And you know, the guys who make all those box products, among many other things, and they also make CF costs, which is probably why we're talking. And I'm surprised to learn Eric, though you did an Information Systems degree, thinking you thought you would hate programming.
Eric Peterson 0:48
Yeah, I did. Especially after my first programming course, in college. I just, it was, I don't know, it just wasn't, it didn't click. I remember, it was a Java course. And all I was doing was sticking things out in the console. And I thought, well, this is kind of boring. And I remember jumping forward to like, we made the game, but I don't remember how any of the code worked. It was just like, edit this one section of the class. And it just didn't click. But uh, but when I graduated and got into a job, there was some web development in it. And I guess having a goal, something to build that people were going to use me that made it much more exciting. So
Michaela Light 1:31
and you were programming in cold fusion in that job? It sounds like,
Eric Peterson 1:34
Yeah, we were a team, we call ourselves shadow IT, because the supply chain that the company had hired myself, along with a few other people to do it projects for them that didn't have to kind of go through the rest of the company prioritization. And so we got to choose our own our own tech and things. And before I got there, actually, they had chosen cold fusion, because they had heard it was easy to get up and running for people who had, let's say, didn't have a formal computer science background.
Michaela Light 2:08
Hmm. So you came from the dark side of Java and information technology? No, it's really dark, but it was me. And then you got into the light with ColdFusion, and JavaScript and other cool stuff. So it's really interesting. And I hear you've written one or two modules in forge box.
Eric Peterson 2:35
Yes, that's kind of how I got my introduction to or this is when I discovered command box called box, that whole ecosystem. I love to see the idea of being able to share reusable code in this way. It seems at the time that the more popular at least programming languages or fruit or frameworks, I'll have this concept, so I was glad to see it exist in the ColdFusion world. And I started putting things in there because I, it wasn't a no than NPM there aren't millions of packages, you know, there was infinite needs. So start to fill in those and keep on. Thanks, John. Have it
Michaela Light 3:21
Yeah, well, thank you for all the help from the whole ColdFusion community for writing those packages and helping promote it because that definitely saves a lot of people a lot of work so but let's talk today about CF cos maybe we should stop because I think some people listening don't even know CF cos exist or they've even heard the name. They're not quite clear what the heck it is. So is it like a another command box is it you know,
Eric Peterson 3:49
what's up? So CF Cass is you can think of it as the Netflix for cold fusion and CFML tutorials. These are bite sized screencasts that you can watch. In order at your own pace, you can go back and reference them to teach you programming bits specifically using cold fusion. So on CF cast, we have courses ranging from you know, beginner programming topics all the way through getting started with coldbox to building out API's using specific frameworks that are the solutions is developed things like that. And we keep releasing new videos every week.
Michaela Light 4:36
That's a lot of videos. I think there's over 300 videos you've got now it's quite
Eric Peterson 4:41
Yeah, so since we launched in 2020, we have just over 340 videos.
Michaela Light 4:48
Wow. And you also have series as well which makes it fit like Netflix so you can binge watch your favorite ColdFusion topic. Yeah, you
Eric Peterson 4:57
can follow on along with the series like if you want To get started with cold box, we have a cold box Zero to Hero series. And you can take it from the beginning of where we assume that you've never used cold box. And by the end, you'll have a site up and running that you can use and build off of
Michaela Light 5:15
cool. And just for folks listening who are not into box stuff, because I know, you know, not everyone has, has drank the box Kool Aid, and which, you know, given that most of it is open source and free give or take, except by hands, just one or two, we have to pay for most of its open source. It's really worth checking it out. And command box has certainly changed the whole development ecosystem of ColdFusion, as have many of the other tools. So but is everything in here about box? Are there other things to do with JavaScript or databases? So
Eric Peterson 5:56
yeah, it's not all box products, there is certainly the majority of it is going to be box products. That's what we know best. And they're tools that we think can definitely help ColdFusion developers be more productive. But we have content on JavaScript, with we have content with databases, you mentioned command box, which can be used independently of any other box product, we have this wonderful Object Oriented Programming course that we commissioned from Nolan Urk, that is there in its entirety to take you kind of from scratch with object oriented design. So yeah, we have we have content for everybody. And one of the good things is you can you can try it before you buy it, we release free videos, as well as paid ones, you don't even have to sign up for an account, you can just come to the website, watch the video and and see if it See for yourself.
Michaela Light 6:53
Very cool. That's even better than Netflix where you have to pay off the bat. I think it's about if you pay by the month, I want to say it's about $30 a month, or there's a discount if you buy a year at a time.
Eric Peterson 7:06
It does discount if you buy a year, the time I will see I believe is $25 A month
Michaela Light 7:13
25 I overstated it okay with you. And the one one way to think of it, I mean, a fair is that, you know, there's a lot of different content in here. And we'll have a look a bit more in detail of what's in there later in the show. But some of the content is entire training classes that you'd have to pay hundreds of dollars to attend, you know, you might be paying $800 to attend a several day ColdFusion training class these days. And that's all in there. So
Eric Peterson 7:42
yeah, absolutely, we've recorded some of the workshops that we've done into the box. And we've made that available, either for any subscriber or some of our our bigger courses like those workshops, you can just pay once and you'll own it forever. There's there's not a subscription to that. So
Michaela Light 8:04
very cool. So lots of good content there. Let me just briefly whoops, share my screen. So people who are coming into a video I'll, I'll describe what I'm seeing for the people just on audio. But here's the CFR site. You can see you can browse let's just briefly do that. See all those 343 different things you can see automating documentation with GitHub actions Brad would talk about latest features in command box five point x using dock box CFR and if I go and do a search I can eat the search for people like Eric see Eric appears in here oh my goodness Louise things up talking about Qb and doing front end with view and building a blog in 30 minutes with cold box and all kinds of stuff in here and then if I just search for database just for the sake of argument you can see a whole bunch of database topics in here from Charlie Earhart Michael born and as even one there tagging you as that steward database as well. So all kinds of things there and then let me just click over to the series. This I think 23 series in here so various webinars or discussed on the podcast the into the box, conference mode or different years and then various training ones that you know using dock box was a I guess a workshop and it has several episodes in there. So all kinds of things. All cn what's all cn is that like
Eric Peterson 9:56
I think it's supposed to be pronounced or to Cn Lucien, okay, one of the artists employees.
Michaela Light 10:03
Oh, okay. I see it's bit like Marcia norfund Lucien, but in those cases or Torossian. Yeah. And the command box zero to hero workshop that that's in there. These are showing prices because I haven't logged in if I was logged in, they'd be included as part of a subscription.
Eric Peterson 10:25
And you can correct if you if you're subscribed, you can watch those videos, but the prices are there for the people who would like to purchase it and not have a subscription. So some of our courses, specifically the big ones, you can purchase one off for lifetime access.
Michaela Light 10:43
There you go. And I'll see if I can log in whoops.
On that before, but never mind. So if I log in all those prices have disappeared when I go in there. And just so you're clear, if you go in to any of these, which let's just go into using Dropbox just so folks can see. So you can see in the series, you know, you've got in this case, it's got five episodes, you can see how long they are. And you see when it was published some of the episodes were free to kind of I guess, get you excited about it. And then the later ones, you have to either be a subscriber or you have to abort if this one was available for sale, you have to abort bought it. So it's kind of a nice modeling, try it out. And then when you go into them, you he gets to play, you get the video. And sometimes you get some other information as well. So whoops, I didn't want to, I didn't want to autoplay that. So that's like, sort of what you can see in there. I don't know if maybe you could tell us a bit about you know, when you created CF cos and what inspired you to create?
Eric Peterson 12:20
Sure, CF cast kind of came about. It came about as a collision from me. And when I came to order solutions. So as we talked about earlier, when I started work, and I started learning ColdFusion I started to get excited about programming and wanted to just eat it up. We were all all mostly self taught developers in my team. And so I jumped into screencasts trying to find things. And there weren't many screencasts for ColdFusion content. And so I actually stumbled upon and really enjoyed a site called Lera casts. Now that's for the PHP framework Laravel. It's done by a man named Jeffrey way. And I actually found his videos on Envato. tuts did, I don't even know how I found these. It was just luck, Lucky Googling, I guess. But I started to watch them. And I've never I think I did some PHP in a college course. That's that's the extent of my PHP programming. But I still watch these because I learned so much about seeing how, in these tutorials he would structure an application or how Laravel chose to do something, or I'd watched his JavaScript ones. And as I've watched these, I'd be like, Man, it would be so nice if there was a ColdFusion version of this to help me know how to do this in cold fusion. And I some months down the road watching these. I thought, well, if nobody's done this, maybe I should. And I went and I registered the CFX cast domain, this is probably back in like 2014 Wow. But I didn't do anything with it because I was nervous. One because I was so new to programming and cold fusion. I didn't feel like I had much to teach but to I was worried that even if I did, could I keep up a good pace to ask people to pay me money for it. You know, having a subscription pricing specifically. Like that's there's a contract there kind of thing, right? I pay you money every month you give me content on some regular release schedule. And if you don't, I'm leaving. And so I didn't build it. But then he began to fast forward to artists. I joined artists in about 2015 I believe. Maybe 2016 have to do the math. Nope, both of those are on 2018. There we go, we have the right date now hasn't been that long and started working for them. See if Cass was still kind of I just paid for the domain registration every year, you know, many of us have those domains. But then Then 2020 came along, and everything went virtual. And we were making plans for into the box to be virtual. And we were going to record all the videos, we were going to set it up, we were going to sell access to the videos for the people who didn't come to the conference. And I went to Luis and I said, Luis, this is this is our moment, I have this domain. And I even have some code I've written for a video tutorial site. We can't just throw this up on Vimeo and sell a Vimeo link we need we need something to showcase ColdFusion and showcase our work. And so he gave me the chance to I told him I can get it, I can get you a proof of concept within two weeks. And it was actually the two weeks during into the box that year. Like I remember logging on giving my talk. And I'd log off and go right back to work on the site. I didn't watch any of the other sessions that until later when they were posted. Because we wanted it up and running. So we could post the videos like the next week. And and we did it, we made it it was a quick goal. But we got the site up to put the into the box videos up and then started building it out from there. I believe the first version of the site, actually you couldn't subscribe. We just gave access to anybody who attended into the box, we gave them a coupon code to get access to it.
Michaela Light 16:54
That sounds like a subscription. Yes, I was one of those early adopters of CF cos because of that.
Eric Peterson 17:02
Yeah, I think we still do that. If you attend into the box, we give you a coupon code to get all those videos forever. You don't have to pay for those who subscribe. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of a nice mix of I've always had this like itch in the back of my head to have a site like this to make videos for it. And then when it could could be be combined with all this with all their amazing products, and also all the amazing instructors. And we can keep that content flowing. And that kind of solved that, that fear of mine. And I'm grateful that Luis saw my vision. And we've been running now, just over about two years with it.
Michaela Light 17:40
What's amazing was over 300 videos in there in just a few years now, I will admit some of those videos are, you know, episodes, the podcast, but a lot of them are like, you know, workshops or talks on the, you know, various topics. So there's a lot of amazing content in there. And it just, you know, I understand the audience of this podcast are mostly English speaking, but just in case you're Spanish speaking, there are some Spanish episodes in there, too. So, so we have a lot of time.
Eric Peterson 18:12
Yeah, we have a whole team, based in Latin America, lots of Spanish speakers and artists. And we also wanted to take this as a opportunity to both show off our tools and, and open source libraries we built for localization wanted to make sure that the show that all off and so CFX cast is fully localized in Spanish as well ready for any other languages when we get when we get people like that along in the artists that can help us and that can teach in those languages. And like you mentioned, we even have videos like the end of the box with Tam and some others that are recorded in Spanish. So yeah, it's fun to have that that multilingual even if it's just two languages right now.
Michaela Light 19:03
It is cool. You know, there's quite a little folks in Latin America you know, program. So let's get more of them programming in cold fusion. Absolutely. I think it's great what you guys are doing in El Salvador, which I think is where your other office is based in San Salvador. And I've been to El Salvador and if you've been there, but I mean, you know, this country has had a few problems. History. I mean, hopefully it's looking looking up since autists. opened an office well actually is looking up because hopefully becoming a center for cryptocurrency and cleaning up various things. So definitely a good thing there. So how many folks is subscribing currently?
Eric Peterson 19:56
So we have Yeah, we have over 500 people currently that with accounts that inquire free members, and over 100 paying subscribers. That also, we have our Patreon who support solutions that also get an account on top of that. And that doesn't account for anybody who watches the videos without logging in. Like I send any of the free videos, you can just come see it, you don't have to put in any information. We hope you do. Like if you sign up for a community account, all we're gonna do is help track what you've watched. And but you get around like that we're not, we're not being weird about it. So, but we hope that the content is good enough to that you want to subscribe. So
Michaela Light 20:49
whoops, I'm a subscriber I you know, I bought it for some of our team members as well, you know, when, if we're putting them on a project, we use this code box, it's like a no brainer till to buy a subscription so they can learn code box really easily, quickly. So we talked for, you know, so many other cool things to me. Yeah, and so many other cool things, you can improve your ColdFusion productivity. And really, I just want to say to people listening, if you're not, you don't have to subscribe to coal box, you don't even have to go to the site and look at the free stuff. But for goodness sake, you do need to improve your programming skills regularly, I would say weekly, but at least monthly, you got to learn something new regularly. Because otherwise you fall behind, you know, programming is constantly evolving. There are tools out now that people use that weren't around a few years ago. And if you're not improving your skills, you're actually going backwards. And I was chatting with some ColdFusion developers about what can we do to you know, make ColdFusion more alive and deal with the mess of legacy code. And some of that is technical, you can do technical things there. But some of it is getting off your backside and actually learning some new techniques tools. Sorry to get a bit ranty here. But you know, your ColdFusion country needs you to modernize your toolset and see if cost is an easy way to do this. So okay, Randall.
Eric Peterson 22:20
I completely agree with you. And I, one of the other reasons we really wanted something like CF cast to exist is people learn in different styles. We have our into the box conference, we have workshops that we do. And then we wanted a place where we could have this on demand bite sized tutorials that you can pause, you can rewind, you can follow along, because people learned in all those ways. Probably more than one, I enjoy all those different types of learning in different, you know, different amounts. So I'm glad that these all exists now.
Michaela Light 22:58
Yeah. Out of interest, any of the videos come with associated code samples? Or how does that work?
Eric Peterson 23:07
Yeah, many of our workshops will give you not access, but it will point you to a repo that's already open source. And that we follow along that will have like a Git history and branches that you can check out to follow along with the code. We encourage you to use that in switch branches only when you need to, but otherwise, try to follow along yourself. That's really the best way to learn. But yeah, so like the coolbox, zero to hero, the up and running was quick. And the command box, zero to hero workshops all have GitHub links in their description that will take you to a repo that can get you set up. Cool.
Michaela Light 23:51
I mean, you know, it's a great way to learn new stuff. I mean, you know, if you can get to a class, obviously, you get help from the instructor or their assistance. But you know, if you for whatever reason you couldn't this is a great way to pick up what the content in those classes and sharpen your skill set. So I'm kind of curious what how did you guys build CF casts?
Eric Peterson 24:19
Well see if Cassie is of course built on CFML it's built on Lucy and coldbox that it runs the backend along with MySQL as our database of choice.
Michaela Light 24:33
On the MySQL, your database of choice? I'm curious what we're familiar with a few dozen other database.
Eric Peterson 24:39
Yeah. We use a lot of SQL Server with clients. Um, you know, open source world, we MySQL and Postgres. Were kind of our choices. And we know a bit more about MySQL than Postgres, so we stuck with that one. MySQL also has some neat things currently The search is actually powered by my sequel, my singles full text matching Oh, as a way to index kind of like an elastic, Elastic Search would definitely not as powerful. And when we launched it, it was great. It's kind of running into creepiness. And we're modernizing that now. But it's done, it's good for two years. On the front end, it uses Vue js along with a library called inertia J. S, which kind of hooks called box and view together without having to build like a full blown API. There is a full if not courses, a few videos on CF CAS about inertia, and at least one of them is free. So if that intrigues you, it meant that I didn't have to write an API didn't have to write two sets of validation. I could share a lot of the coolbox stuff, but still use Vue js, and all of the reactive JavaScript on the front end. The videos are hosted on Vimeo and Stripe handles all of our payments.
Michaela Light 26:14
Sounds like a great stack you put together there.
Eric Peterson 26:18
Yeah, it's been it's been a lot of fun to build on and to build with.
Michaela Light 26:24
And is it just you who maintains it? Or do you have help these days? Or? Yeah, we
Eric Peterson 26:30
have a few team members that artists who put a few hours in to add new features in update some of the design? I don't, unfortunately, I don't get to put as much time as I did originally, right? It was a lot of time upfront to get the site up. And now I'm more kind of managing it. I would I would love to dive in again and get something big done. Maybe Maybe here in the next few months, I can get out a fun feature redesign.
Michaela Light 27:01
Yeah, I mean, without committing you to any feature in particular, what would you what are you excited about adding to the site in the next year or two?
Eric Peterson 27:10
We have we are, we have in progress, a nice redesign of the video page to make some of the information easier, especially in the description easier to read, and to access. And we have a full search, refactoring going on moving it into Elastic Search, actually having better heuristics for the search more filters and just getting better search results. Because like I said, my the MySQL one worked well, when we had you know, 2030 videos. And now it's, it's easy to get search results back and we go Hmm, well, what's that one? Why is that coming back? So. So that's the one I'm most excited about. And that one's in progress right now.
Michaela Light 27:59
I make sense. Because, you know, when you launched it, you had maybe 30 videos in there. Now you've got 10 times as many so right. To improve things. And you know, may you have 3000 videos in there. Real soon now.
Eric Peterson 28:15
That will be great. Another few years.
Michaela Light 28:17
Yeah, another few years. Yeah, I think you have that. Particularly when you you know, you, you, you you guys keep doing cool workshops. And also you've got other people like Charlie Earhart, on all, you know, doing content for it as well, either from into the box or as a direct workshop. So lots of you know, reasons you could you have, but I think you've made a commit not you just you but the whole horde has got a commitment that you're just going to continue putting great content out NCF casts so
Eric Peterson 28:54
yeah, I'm the CFO of on these podcasts we do. We mentioned that CF cast will release content every week. Wow, what a commodity, something new, either free or paid. Once a week, sometimes you get more, right. Sometimes the box happens and you get your 20 videos, and sometimes you get one. But uh that's that's our commitment. Now,
Michaela Light 29:21
let me ask. Yeah, that's great commitment. I mean, if you got 50 plus new things a year coming in. That's right. Let me ask you this. See if costs work on from your phone as well as your desktop or? Yeah,
Eric Peterson 29:36
yeah, fully responsive, consume it. Yeah, fully responsive. You can watch it on your phone, tablet. I mean, I needed that because I I would stay up late in the night, just watching on my tiny iPhone screen when I started, you know, on the layer cast site. That's how I did it. I wasn't not a computer. So I would I would definitely want that to happen. I would say rewatch them until I tell it sunk in?
Michaela Light 30:06
Well, that's a good way I have friends who do that with audiobooks, you know, they listened to business books or whatever. You know, they listened to the book a few times, because they often you hear different things, and they'll do it while they're doing other tasks, or they're exercising or whatever the thing is. So it's nice that you, you can do that. Yeah, it's amazing how people listen to and I have to remember that way, you know, for the podcast, you know, people aren't always by the computer, whether, you know, they're consuming a podcast episode, they might be doing something else. And so they it's not like they can just type in some resource. So we put together a show notes page with all the things mentioned. So people can find it and go back to it. Because I know that is a you know, it's a different way of consuming content. Right. Cool. Anything else? I should have asked you about CF cos I forgot to ask Eric.
Eric Peterson 31:07
A fun show that I want to put out to the tech stack that I forgot. And that really made it possible to do in that two weeks was telling CSS and telling you I I've never been a big CSS person. It's never really clicked until telling came along. tailwind is you're gonna love it or hate it until you use it, and then you'll probably love it. But telling you I was a kid that the creators of tailwind CSS put out that was like here are application scaffolding building blocks. You want a sidebar that's fully responsive. Here you go, you want a card, here you go, you want this, and then you would just tweak it to match your design. And so that's how I could get a I mean, the majority of what you see on CF cast, especially the marketing page, I took one of their examples and just tweaked a few things. And I have a full page in 30 minutes. telling you I does cost but I mean, I think I made up the money right then based on my time, so give them a shout out and all my friends that were the second laugh that I made sure to mention tailwind CSS, because I'm kind of known for being obsessed with them at work. So
Michaela Light 32:24
Oh, cool. Well, we'll definitely add that to the show notes. I'm kind of curious how much it costs. Now you make it sound like you've got to, you know, it was a box by looks of it.
Eric Peterson 32:35
Yeah, very reasonable. You can get all of their components and templates for I think 280. And you can use that on any project that you you work on.
Michaela Light 32:48
And it looks like that consists of general UI marketing UI and E commerce related stuff. Because you can get separately I'm looking at
Eric Peterson 32:57
the other ecommerce one is is new. I actually haven't used those. We got it back with his application and marketing. So yeah, it's been great. So
Michaela Light 33:09
Well, that's good. Good to hear, though. You mentioned all the tech used to build it. I'm guessing you must have used command box in there, too.
Eric Peterson 33:19
Oh, yeah. Come on command box installs all the modules that we have inside there. I use it to run the server locally, using to run the server in production. So Wow. In the Docker image, yeah. So
Michaela Light 33:31
tell me, this is running the production site runs in Docker, using command box? Up in some cloud providers somewhere?
Eric Peterson 33:41
Yeah, we have our own order swarm built out. And we use Git lab to orchestrate that and whenever we push up the master to rebuild that command box image and the plate up there.
Michaela Light 33:54
What is an auto swarm like Kubernetes? Six, or is it just a Docker Swarm swarm?
Eric Peterson 34:00
No, we haven't drunk the Kubernetes Kool Aid yet. So it's just the Docker Swarm. We use a lovely application called portainer to manage it. And yeah, it works really well.
Michaela Light 34:15
Very cool. Um, but you have an episode on on using darker fanatics on CF calm.
Eric Peterson 34:26
Yes, we do. I believe that
Michaela Light 34:27
Jon Moss, maybe you need to check that out.
Eric Peterson 34:29
I really do.
Michaela Light 34:33
Yes. Gotta go to see you. What do they say the shoe maker has to fix their own shoes as well. So yeah, so much. So many episodes in there. I'm sure it's hard to keep up with consuming it. So Well, cool. Well, tell it let's just switch it up a minute before we end the show. I'm curious Eric worldwide why you're proud to use cold fusion, you know this year
Eric Peterson 35:02
I'm proud to use cold fusion because there is so many innovations going on in the cold fusion space. It might, it's a small community compared to others, but it's very welcoming. There's lots of good work going on. And things that are still impressing me. And I'll tell you working with many different clients, you'd be surprised how much of the world is runs on this good old fashioned software like cold fusion doesn't have to be the the fanciest, latest and greatest to work well, and I am proud to use use tool, excuse me. I'm proud to use a language like that. And also to be able to contribute tools like that, that make life easier for other developers.
Michaela Light 35:58
Those are all great reasons to be proud of cold fusion. And I will say from my own research on, you know, how many people use cold fusion, a lot of cold fusion sites or intranet, you know, they're, they're not publicly visible. I think it's about three to one ratio, and from my rough back of the envelope, things and talk to people. So you know, when you use those tools that tell you what, you know, how what, how popular is a language, it's a bit of a distorted view. And then secondly, modern sites for the last at least five years, they don't expose dot C F M, or dot php, on the file extensions. And for security reasons, a lot of people stopped the header saying this was written in this language. So it's often hard to tell what a site is written in using one of those. So for my own and Brad Woods research, we go to a site one of us has written and we say, what was it written in? And we knew it was in either Adobe ColdFusion or Lucia or whatever. And built with comes back says, Yes, is it written in dotnet, I'm using a slightly Eastern European accent, they're just make fun of them. And we did try and contact their support, maybe we should try again. But I tried about five times to say, Hey, guys, you know, your algorithm could do a little tweaking, it's 2020, not 1997. And, you know, modern apps are built in modern ways. And you may have to dig a bit in order to know what the technology is. Right? So yeah, um, so as you know, you know, we're on a mission here to make cold fusion more alive. So what would it take to make cold fusion more alive this year, in your view?
Eric Peterson 37:53
Well, I'm always a fan of being involved in the community. There's lots of places that you can be involved in that community, we have called TF cast itself, we have the ColdFusion, Slack, we have conferences, like into the box, the Adobe ColdFusion, forums, any of the webinars going on, I think coming into CF casts and consuming, even, you know, even just the free content, learning from what's being put out there, and improving our ColdFusion skills. I think those are great ways to make ColdFusion more alive. To your point about websites built in CFML, or has just launched a project repo on GitHub, built with CFML box. And it's a place that you can go contribute details about any websites you have that are built with CFML. Not just websites, that's optional, but just like your company uses it. And we use these tools to showcase all these great places that are using cold fusion, blue sea, cold box, CF Lilz, framework one, all these great frameworks and tools. And being proud of it
Michaela Light 39:11
is a great initiative, you're doing that. And you know, I think there are a lot of sites out there. And you know, sometimes people in hopefully less this year, but in the past, people used to be almost ashamed to say something's written in ColdFusion because all the Java and C developers and whatever will gang up on them like kids in the playground and beat them up mentally. But it's it's so silly, isn't it? It is. I think it I, I try not to be critical about the people too much. But maybe some of those other developers criticizing ColdFusion. You know, they say when you point a finger, oops, there's my camera pointing at someone else three fingers pointing back to you, and perhaps some of them feeling a little insecure about their own language. So in order to pump themselves up, they beat up the other kids using another language. That's maybe what's going on, or just that's a little pop psychology. I think Java, PHP, dotnet, ColdFusion, are all over 25 years old. And you know, you use the tool that works for you and for the project. Yeah,
Eric Peterson 40:24
I mean, I think we have so much to learn from all those tools, we don't need to really be putting down any of them, we can take what we think works and leave what doesn't, because there's so much.
Michaela Light 40:37
I think the not very well hidden secret is a lot of these tools were inspired from similar tools in other languages. And I think that is true in other languages, very ecosystem, often, you know, we inspire each other. And it's, you know, it's more like, fight to the death, cage fight competition between languages, they can all grow and learn for and cooperate and, you know, great ideas. I mean, for me,
Eric Peterson 41:07
we open this talking about how I've written a lot of modules. And I don't know, I'm taking a wild guess now. But like, kind of 70% of them were inspired or almost copied, I mean, from a different language from JavaScript from PHP from from a Java library. And I found it fun, because I will always learn something new and their approach. And sometimes I can add in something from CFML, that I think makes it better. Sometimes it's just bringing it over. And sometimes it improves. And it's, it's like, it's a it's a it's a better version, because it's an CFML to me, and I find that fun. And I think I'm glad that I have the chance to do that, you know, if you see a module, something you like, in different language, bring it over, look at their source code, see how you do it. And in ColdFusion, those are the those are my favorite kind of modules to build, because I didn't have to come up with the idea I just had, at
Michaela Light 42:06
validation that it's a useful module to build to. Yeah, that's
Eric Peterson 42:10
right. Exactly. So.
Michaela Light 42:13
So. But yeah, it's definitely good to look at how you know how things are, are done in other other code, whether it's cold fusion or PHP, or, you know, whatever the hot kid at the moment happens to be, and, you know, there's some, some bad ColdFusion code out there. There's some great ColdFusion code out there. And it's good to have a wide
Eric Peterson 42:38
I've written both of them exposure.
Michaela Light 42:40
Yeah, yeah, I can learn we can learn from looking at good code, we can learn looking back sometimes code in my experiences. I don't know if I'm using the right phrase here, but sometimes people people make and this isn't just aimed at cold fusions, all languages sometimes people make things too good. too abstract. Too clever. Clever. Yep. So it's, it's a bit of a balance thing. There's a into the box conference coming up. I think since September this year, probably in Houston, Texas. I'm going to make a wild guess location.
Eric Peterson 43:15
Yes. Good. Wild guess it is. It's at the end of September. We announced the dates on the podcast and I don't have them up but it's the last weekend in September. i It isn't Houston. But I think it's going to be the new venue. That you are not positive on that. So I might be building up people's hopes and letting them down but still in the Houston area. Yeah, very excited. I love in the box. It's it's my favorite ColdFusion conference. Unfortunately, a
Michaela Light 43:47
conference. I've been a few times. And unfortunately with the travel restrictions, it was a little hard to travel from Peru to Houston, I guess. Like, I think theoretically, I could have done it because Texas was pretty like laissez faire about how restrictions were but Peru was on the opposite end of the scale there. Right. I could have got there. I could just never got back.
Eric Peterson 44:12
Yeah, that's that's not ideal. We're,
Michaela Light 44:16
anyway, so it's an amazing conference, very intimate. It's about 200 people ish. 150 200 depends on the year. And you know, as I I always say to people, it's it's not just box stuff, it has quite a lot of called non box ColdFusion stuff that you could probably almost go, yeah, you could just attend non box things. If that was your deal. I think it would be silly, but I'm just saying it's possible to do that, you know, p3 tags talking about security and Charlie's talking about performance tuning or database staff. You know, there's all kinds of stuff and it's good to expose yourself to new box tools. You know, every year it seems I don't this is just an impression, but it seems every year A new, either a new box tool or a new dramatically improved version of an existing box library or tool.
Eric Peterson 45:08
Yeah, I love the the keynotes into the box because we get to show off all the things we've been building and you know the things, we've worked with lots of clients, and we put the things that we think will help the most people into cold box into the modules. And like you said, if cold box isn't your cup of tea, even if you come to those and you find something you want to rip and take to your project, or make your own library for yours, that's great. You know, like, this is all open source. We don't. We're happy if you learn something. And we're happy if our code is is useful and helpful to you.
Michaela Light 45:47
Yeah, and it's also a great chance to chat to people in the corridor, you know, either you, Eric or other, you know, Caucasian experts will meet other coffee and developers just say, Hey, I've got doing this. I just went to the website for into the box and it says Hyatt Place in The Woodlands. So um, I think that was isn't that the same as it was last year?
Eric Peterson 46:10
Maybe they just have 2021 dates that you have there?
Michaela Light 46:13
Well, I don't know. That's a good question. I maybe I better a raise those dates. I guess maybe they're not. You said, Yeah. I can quickly verify that by in September
Eric Peterson 46:26
27 through 30th. This year.
Michaela Light 46:30
The website is not up to date, the website, right ColdFusion code, the auto updates dates of the conference. Well,
Eric Peterson 46:37
if I got the end of the box, that org is for end of the box 2021. So it has not been updated. You thought we we are working on that?
Michaela Light 46:47
Yes. Okay, we were a bit ahead of our time. So we'll put the correct dates in the show notes. And that would indicate the location that's on the website currently is probably last year's location, and this year might be somewhere else in.
Eric Peterson 47:04
In the Houston area,
Michaela Light 47:05
Houston metro area, which is if for those who haven't been to Houston Houston is sort of like Los Angeles but filled with Texans. In other words, it's like 50 miles across them, that freeways go on forever. And they're about 50 lanes across that I'm exaggerating slightly. They easily could be 10 lanes across in a freeway. It's quite a city. It's also a little warm.
Eric Peterson 47:29
It's very humid. I come from 0% humidity and
Michaela Light 47:36
yes. All right. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show today and telling us all about CF cast and how you created it. And if people want to find you online, Eric, well, what are the best ways to track you down?
Eric Peterson 47:51
Well, you can find me inside the CFO slack. And on GitHub at I'm at El Pete and I'm on Twitter at the same well underscore ELP. And yeah, those are the great places to get a hold of me.
Michaela Light 48:08
Or you have a blog, I think right?
Eric Peterson 48:12
I have a blog. The blog is the blog is not up right. So I do blog on the artist site occasionally. You can find me in videos on CF cast or you can come to Houston, end of September friend of the box and chat with me they're
Michaela Light 48:30
fabulous. All right, well have a fabulous ColdFusion year and hope to see you again on the show sometime in the future.
Eric Peterson 48:38
Thank you so much for having me.
