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Michaela Light 0:01
Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to be talking about moving your ColdFusion dye into the cloud with Oracle Cloud Migration with Scotts froze, and got it joining us from exotic West Virginia, in the United States of America. And you may not know, Scott, he's been doing cold fusion stuff for years. And he's got some he used to run the CFR podcast with with it, Dave, or who are you running that with? Dave Ferguson? Dave Ferguson? Yeah. And he's the developer advocate for my sequel, which many of the listeners will be using for their database? If they're not still on the dark side with SQL Server? So that was a joke. You said that not me. Yes.
We have complete freedom in this podcast, though.
So and he also has been doing software development for you said 20 plus years. I'm sure you in your bio, I'm sure you've been doing for 25 years.
Scott Stroz 1:00
Not quite, not quite. Also done network administration being an operations manager. And he is also a paramedic. So November's eto, former paramedic, oh, former. I stopped being a paramedic a long time ago. You did. Oh, that's certified anymore.
Michaela Light 1:20
Okay. And as well as cold fusion. You also do things with Groovy and Grails Angular view. Micronauts. I think you'd mentioned Python and all kinds of other Sonos. Yeah, node. So yeah, lots of cool stuff. Lots of experience. This man has. Welcome to the show. Thanks. It's great to be here. So I think we should start with the So speak elephant in the room. What is this Oracle cloud thing? Because I've never heard of it until you mentioned it to me.
Scott Stroz 1:50
Well, I don't like that. But Oracle Cloud is basically it's, it's our and when I say our I mean Oracle's cloud services. So part of that our compute instances which are like VMs, you can have, you can run Oracle database in the cloud as autonomous dB. You can run MySQL on the cloud as MySQL ewave. Their storage buckets, there's going to be integration with the help with generative AI. And it's it's not as
There aren't as many features in our plan right now as there is in AWS because AWS has I mean, there's just a ton of stuff in AWS. But in but what we do offer, we do very well.
Michaela Light 2:44
Well, that's good to hear. I you know, I was just being honest there that I hadn't heard of it until you mentioned it. So I it's good that you coming on the podcast so people can hear about it and realize there's not just
Scott Stroz 2:57
AWS or Google Cloud services or whatever, out there. We've got other options available. And it is it and that's really what it is. It's another option from AWS, you know, from AWS, Azure,
And Google web services. But I think the thing that that sets, Oracle Cloud or OCI is that's that's how the cool kids say it. Oh, see I OCI Oracle Cloud infrastructure, which that's a lot of syllables to say, so I like yeah, for OCI. But one of the I think, advantages we have for people just getting started is that Oracle, Cloud has a very robust, always free tier. And it's not, you know, that the, it's free until it's not like some other providers, it literally is you like you can spin up some compute instances, without even having to give Oracle a credit card. Wow. And you can run those instances in there and they're small, you know, you're not going to be able to run a, you know, a multimillion dollar company off of it. But if you're just getting started, you know, if you have an idea, or you have a small business or a small project you want to use for you know, Cloud Hosting, then, or cloud is a great way to start it because I have a small app that I've been using for about 13 years, I manage a golf League, and I wrote a web application to help me manage that golf league. And I've been hosting that on Oracle Cloud now for five or six years. And I haven't paid a penny for it.
Michaela Light 4:36
So if you've got a startup or an open source project or a nonprofit, or personal project might be good, good option for that. Absolutely. And of course, for those who aren't aware, Oracle actually is the what are the I don't what you want to call it, but the force behind my sequel now, if
Scott Stroz 4:56
I say the steward, the steward Oh, Yes. So Oracle manages MySQL. And they handle the, the Community Edition. So that's the free open source edition that I'd say probably most people who have used MySQL get started with. But we also do have paid for products like MySQL standard MySQL enterprise and MySQL Heatwave, which heatwave is actually the version of MySQL that runs in the cloud. So it's like it's databases of services.
Michaela Light 5:36
Sorry, got a little muted there. While I was trying to write down what you were saying. Because I'd never heard of heatwave, I'd heard of the Community Edition of MySQL. So there's like a kind of a paid edition or supported edition or what
Scott Stroz 5:51
The MySQL heatwave is just the version of MySQL, it's available as a service in Oracle Cloud. There are other pieces to it. There's a lot of different functionality that can be added to heatwave. One of them is in in data memory, or I'm sorry, in memory database that allows you to do analytic queries against your data. You know, if you had, you know, like an analytics engine, unfortunately, that is also called heatwave. So it can get a little bit confusing sometimes. But I tell people, that heatwave is, first and foremost, the my SQL in a cloud offering through or so it's a fully managed database. So you don't have to worry about your backups or anything, you can configure that all through a web interface, when you configure your instance. So you can configure how long you want to keep your, your backups, you know what the maintenance window would be what the backup window would be. So like, you can specify what time you want your backups to start running. What times if you have the maintenance setup, or you're going to be upgrading your version automatically, you can specify, you know at what time of day, you want that to actually happen. And there's, I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff that you can configure with that, but
Michaela Light 7:09
That that would compare I think, I think Microsoft will bear or bring out the sequel name. And then I'm pretty sure AWS and Google Cloud have databases there. So this is that your Oracle's version of the Manage Database solution can scale up and be paid right arrow.
Scott Stroz 7:31
And the difference between Oracle clouds version of the manage the managed MySQL database is that in Oracle Cloud, it's Enterprise Edition. So if you are using MySQL heatwave in Oracle Cloud, you're actually using Enterprise Edition. But from the other vendors, if you're using their MySQL manage versions, it's actually Community Edition. And with enterprise, there are some performance boosts. And there are some enhanced security features available. There's there's other stuff that's involved, too, but those are the two big ones that come to mind right now. And something else is sometimes the other vendors, they kind of lag behind the most recent version of MySQL. So it could be one or two versions behind from what you would actually get in key ways.
Michaela Light 8:20
Very cool. I mean, I think people who use MySQL really don't see all the parallel, I was watching Ben Adele, he's been playing out with the latest version of MySQL, which I can't remember which version is doesn't really matter. But the point was, he found all these new features that had been put in it and who knew?
Scott Stroz 8:40
Yeah, there's, you know, there's stuff that we, you know, we we need to try and keep up with the Joneses, you know, so there's new features that are added. You know, I just saw something from from Ben Adel, the other day where I was like, I didn't I didn't even know we had that.
Michaela Light 8:58
Well, I think he must have a clone because he said he not only does he have a full time job, but he seems to spend all this time investigating cool. Software. Exactly. fusion of what have you, and he finds all these amazing things. Do, you know, we didn't know or features that don't quite work? Right. And the other thing is sometimes fine. Right?
Not necessarily mysqli. But it's very powerful database. If you haven't used my people listening, haven't used MySQL recently. You know, it's definitely improved.
Scott Stroz 9:38
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I I've been using it for over 20 years. Wow. I started using MySQL in my first job as a web developer, mostly because I didn't have a budget. So I had to use all free open source products. And the golf league application that I mentioned before it runs on MySQL. So I bet been using it pretty much nonstop since 2001. I think, wow. It's still open tools. Yes, there is an open source version. There are, like I mentioned, there are some performance enhancements and some security features that are available in enterprise that aren't available in community. But each time there is a new version of MySQL that comes out the community version, or the open source version is updated as well.
Michaela Light 10:27
Well, that's cool. And then how I mean, I'm assuming you've sometimes do touch Microsoft SQL Server on various things you do?
Scott Stroz 10:38
Actually, I haven't used SQL Server in quite some time, really. But yeah, it's my before I joined Oracle, the projects that I was on, one of them used Oracle DB. I'm trying to remember the project before that. Maybe it was a project before that we use SQL Server. Maybe it's a maybe it's been closer than then than I remember. But, um,
Michaela Light 11:08
Just trying to be as unbiased as you can, how would my SQL compare to SQL Server? Because, you know, 15 years ago, it kind of lacked some of the transactional processing, right, of the features that SQL Server had, is that still true? Or does it now have,
Scott Stroz 11:23
There's there's a lot of stuff that MySQL has caught up with? It with with some of the other vendors in people, I, when I go to conferences and events, and people ask, you know, well, why should I choose MySQL over another database, and my knee jerk reaction is because I'm telling you to use MySQL. But, you know, I, for me, and I was at a conference, and it was actually the first conference I was at as an Oracle employee. And I had somebody come up to me from another open source database, and I'm not going to mention the name. But they seem to like want to kind of pick a fight. Like, they were like, Well, why do you think my SQL is better? And I'm like, I can't tell you whether or not I think it's better because I've never used that other product. And then he called me a liar, because I never used the product. And I said, Well, me personally, and all the work I've ever done with MySQL, I never had a problem it couldn't solve. And, again, he called me a liar. And I was like, it seems you're trying to pick a fight, and it's not going to happen. So maybe you should just walk away and be happy with the fact that there's another open source database, you can use. It, it's really kind of weird to see how people are so like, married to a database? It's like, I never really, yeah, I never really thought about it so much I and the thing is, I would choose my SQL, that would be like, my, my first choice. And that would have been my first choice before I joined or, but probably because I've been using it for so long. It's the database, and I know better than the others. So unless I had a problem that I knew my SQL couldn't solve, that's going to be my go to, you know, that's, you know, I know, I know what it can do. I don't know everything it can do. But, you know, from my experience, I know what it's capable of. I know it can scale. Because we have customers that use MySQL that have 1000s of nodes running across the planet. So it scales.
For the stuff that while I am you've got 1000s of nodes or going and is this going to some kind of clustered MySQL, I forget what the name of that open source project that's my sequel, clustered? I don't, I don't know, I can't speak to their, their internal architecture. Okay. But I do know that they have 1000s of ISKCON instances scattered.
So it's, it's scalable. It's, it's performant. This same customer has, you know, data throughput that even probably five years ago, people would be like, there's that there's no way you could get that much data. But they do. And they do it well. So it's
Michaela Light 14:32
Maria DB was the name I was trying to think of.
Scott Stroz 14:35
Maria DB was actually started by the same developer who created MySQL. And he forked I forget when but I know that he had forked the MySQL repo and started Maria dB. Right now, though, it has diverged so much than It's hard to say it's compatible. MySQL used to be, you know, almost a one for one. You know, if you hadn't read DB running, you could run any code against it that you had for MySQL. And that's not necessarily
Michaela Light 15:13
We've done that many years ago. Yep. But now it's no longer a fork. Maybe it's become a spoon or
Scott Stroz 15:21
whatever the correct Yeah, it's almost like it's almost like a completely separate product this point. And please, people who are listening who might be Maria DB fans, I'm not disparaging Maria DB in any way. I'm just saying. I don't think it's, it can be considered compatible with MySQL. I mean, like it used to.
Michaela Light 15:38
And is this Michael Monty? Willdan? Yes, or whatever. That's the guy who could be Yeah, could be. That's what, that's what my quick googling determined. But yeah, it's not totally compatible anymore. Things move on. I mean, it's the same story. Why didn't Microsoft SQL Server fork off something else? I can't remember what it forked from open source eating at some points,
Scott Stroz 16:02
Years and years and years ago?
Michaela Light 16:05
Yeah, 25 years ago. But I mean, even Oracle Database came out of that audio BMS research that was done like 35 years ago. Yeah. Back in the 70s. I think back in 70. Yeah, I remember using Oracle, I think it was version two. I don't know what it was some old version, or PDP 11. It was great for that, you know, wasn't any other relational database that actually work back then. So very cool on my sequel, definitely worth checking out, you can run it in the cloud, you can run it on your virtual private server, you can run it on your own laptop.
Scott Stroz 16:50
We have Docker images that are available that are available for it as well. Wow.
Michaela Light 16:53
Yep, very modern. You sound far more hip than you know.
Scott Stroz 17:01
Than the gray hair would indicate. Well, I didn't
Michaela Light 17:04
want to say that myself. But now you've said it. Yeah.
Scott Stroz 17:08
So no, I, it's funny. I only know about the the, I shouldn't say only No, but I only use the Docker stuff recently. Because one of the things that I do in my role is I work with professors, teachers, students, to help promote using MySQL in the classroom. And I had somebody reach out to me and say, Hey, what's the best way to get this up and running? And I was like, Well, probably the fastest way. And the least problematic way would be to just spin up a Docker image. I wanted to use it and he wanted to use it in his class. And he tried doing the installer, and he ran into issues. And he was afraid that if he ran into issues, some of the students would end issues and he was just trying to mitigate that. So I was like, just, you know, you can try using our Docker images, it's actually pretty easy to get those up and running. As long as they have Docker installed or Docker command
Michaela Light 18:02
Walks or whatever. Yep. If you're so apparent, I just discovered I didn't know this info. So Sybase is what Microsoft SQL Server was, yes, yes, you're right. And I think Sybase has gone to database heaven and it no longer.
Scott Stroz 18:19
I think you're right. I even remember in my early days of CF development, that the driver was the same whether you were hitting Sybase or SQL Server. Oh, wow.
Michaela Light 18:31
There you go.
Scott Stroz 18:32
I think I'm really dating my CF usage there.
Michaela Light 18:37
I'm sure you go back to version one or there abouts.
Scott Stroz 18:41
No, not quite 505.
Michaela Light 18:44
I was gonna ColdFusion it was written in C. Yep. Yep. And it was a great version. Very reliable, and then they rewrote it in Java, which of course, that's another little Oracle product, isn't it? Java? Yep. Yeah. Or at least one flavor of Java. Stewart's of Java. That sounds like a next television series after Game of Thrones. I think we should ask why you moved this ColdFusion site to Oracle Cloud. Where Why would you put something in the cloud because not everyone I talked to a lot of people who you know do ColdFusion development or their CIOs or whatever not all of them have moved to the cloud. I have to tell you Yeah, probably there are people listening are like well why should I do that?
Scott Stroz 19:37
So for me it's ease you know a lot of the the stuff that I don't like like I don't like doing network administration. I don't like managing servers. I don't like managing hardware that's the you know, those are like the things I despise least about the the IT world In terms of what I've done before in the past, so it kind of that kind of takes stuff out of it, you know, it takes that off my plate, let somebody else worry about it. And I think probably the best excuse for lack of a better word you can use for going to cloud is, I think the cloud is the great equalizer. So when you are using cloud computing to host your database, or to host your website, you actually are able to afford resources and functionality that you might not have been able to afford if you had servers sitting in your server in your building. And one of the examples I use there is, you can spin up a compute instance to host a ColdFusion site. But you can also configure that so that if it gets busy, you can spin up multiple instances during the busy period. And when when things get slow down again, then those instances will spin back down, and you'll go back down to just one or two or whatever you have. Now, imagine doing that with a server you have in your server closet, you know, you'd actually have to invest in a brand new server, you know, and get it configured and all this other stuff. And, you know, the, the way I the way I looked at or I've seen things is, I think cloud is very cost effective for smaller companies. And very cost effective for very big companies. It's like the medium sized companies that might not be so there might be a point in time, where you get so big, where you need more resources, that might not necessarily be cost effective in the cloud for what you need. So at that point, it may be worth bringing stuff in house. But then once you have stuff in house, you may grow so big, there's no longer cost effective for you to keep everything in house, and you go back up to the cloud,
Michaela Light 21:58
You haven't been reading those 37 signals posts about how they moved out of cloud back to in house virtual private servers. I have not. There's so unlike any other theory, the other.
Scott Stroz 22:11
The other really big advantage, you know, when you get when when you have a project or against a certain size, is that you can have, you know, instances of your website or database, remember hosted in different parts of the world that's going to help with latency. And again, trying to do that in house. That's hard, because then you got to have real estate in you know, in different countries. And you know, you have, there's a whole other set of legal issues you need to worry about. Whereas here, you can just say, You know what, I want to put this in, put this instance in this region, and you're done.
Michaela Light 22:46
Oh, definitely much easier. The been up further scale. And, you know, I sometimes wonder what I'm using cloud is that even physical machine, I know there are physical machine, but they like, it's so hidden. You can't tell what physical machine you're running on. It's a hardware issue, it's just dealt with automatically. You don't have to add memory, you just click a button and it's added, it's not like you have to order memory from Dell or whoever you're getting your hardware from. You just click a button, and there it is more memory, more CPU more depth.
Scott Stroz 23:23
Exactly. And you can actually do that and have minimal downtime, if any. Yeah. So I mean, it really does open up a lot of possibilities, especially to people or companies that might not be able to who have afforded them before in the past. Yeah, that's why sorry, the equalizer to me,
Michaela Light 23:44
I think was an acronym out there. But I mean, basically, it's whatever DevOps service or hardware as a service, I can't think of the right acronym that they use for this. But the whole point is you you've outsourced all of network admin hardware, that that gives you headaches, and then you can just focus on the clever architecture of your app and the programming. And ditto with getting a database like MySQL in the cloud, you're not having to manage that database. And you still need a DBA of some kind, like, Oh, absolutely.
Scott Stroz 24:24
So though,
Michaela Light 24:26
How is my sequel on, you know, automatically tuning up the database, or whackers? I know, is a bit of that. And
Scott Stroz 24:34
so on my team, we we have, there's two of us who are kind of public facing myself and colleague I have in Belgium, and he likes to tell people, I'm not a developer. I'm a DBA. And I've actually I've actually, kind of co op at the end say I'm not a DBA. I'm a developer. So when it comes to performance tuning and stuff like that, he's the person that like I would ask questions of like, Hey, Fred, how can we do this? Or, Hey, I talked to somebody and I'm having this issue, you know, what can I do? And, you know, he's probably forgotten more about MySQL than I'll ever know. But so for, for DBA type stuff like that, like, I know, like high level stuff like backups, and how to restore stuff. But you know, what a lot of the individual settings do, and how that can increase your performance or decrease your performance, if you don't do it right. Is it's not something I've actually been able to wrap my head around yet. And I think part of that is because I don't really manage very large instances of MySQL with, you know, ridiculous datasets. So I do know that you can tweak performance on the heatwave side in the cloud pretty easily through a web interface.
Michaela Light 25:54
Yeah, I've seen this trend in databases, I don't know if it was Oracle or SQL server where they have some kind of intelligent machine learning or AI, kind of auto tune type thing going on
Scott Stroz 26:06
there is there in heat wave, there is some functionality that uses AI and machine learning to help you dictate or help you predict what your usage might be. Or it'll determine when you spin up a new instance, because things got busy, what shape of instance to use. So there's there there are there are pieces of heat wave that use AI and machine learning to help manage things, but I don't think it's completely automated.
Michaela Light 26:43
Well, I think like Oracle database does do a bit of that. So maybe eventually, that knowledge will make it to MySQL. They have a thing called the automated automatic database diagnostic monitor. Em, they love acronyms. So I think this is the trend in databases and in all thing appear to related right, we've seen this with cold fusion with a fusion reactor guys having their little AI monitoring stuff. I know the Adobe folks are like working on adding AI features in Fusion 2024. So I think there is this trend to like, get some help with all the software that we use for a building out right to make them more self healing or self improving. But it could trend it doesn't do away with DBAs or programmers. I mean, I saw a little conversation between Mark tackler, Connor and Brody was bitten the dowel and Ben was saying how he was you he tried out chat GPT to like get you know how it codes, some ColdFusion code and it kind of dorks it up. And he had to like, tell it several times. And it still talks about so he and Mark was saying, well, first of all, you need to pay for the paid version of Chatri, PT and not cheap out on the free one. And secondly, it's like how you've got it. It's a whole art to ask questions to these. Train them. So anyway, that's a whole other topic. So I think you've convinced me and hopefully the listeners that they should be checking out cloud hosting style, that cold fusion apps, databases data. But why Oracle Cloud? There's a lot of clouds out there.
Scott Stroz 28:36
So I would say probably the biggest reason to is, as I mentioned before, we have a very robust, always free tier. So right now, if you sign up, you can actually get up to four compute instances. So they're like VMs, in any combination, up to four CPUs and 24 gigabytes of RAM. Wow. And that's included as part of the always free tier. So you could have four instances each with with one CPU and eight gigabytes of RAM, and I forget the storage, but I want to say it's like 100 gigabytes of storage. Maybe I could be wrong there though. And you'll never pay anything. That's actually what I run my belflex site on is and those are, those are ARM architecture. So you need to be careful. Some some things can be problematic to run on. If you're using ARM architecture, and Lucy happens to be one of them.
Michaela Light 29:40
Oh, it did
Scott Stroz 29:41
Happen to be one and they may have gotten I don't know, like a
Michaela Light 29:44
More sophisticated CPU but Adobe ColdFusion is fine or
Scott Stroz 29:49
No actually I'm running right now. Lucy by I was five three I think maybe
I
Haven't updated the Lucie engine in quite a while. So the so the issue I had was that I had the site and I had the database and the in ColdFusion running on the same server running on the same VM, same VPS. And it was actually hosted in Europe. Because this was from one of the the sponsors from CF our when Dave and I were doing the podcast, and they gave us each of EPS that we could use for whatever we wanted. And I was like, okay, cool, I know what I'm doing. And it wasn't bad. I mean, if you consider the fact that the signal had to go across the ocean, and then back again, you know, the latency wasn't too bad or the you know, the response time wasn't really too bad. But when I moved it to OCI, because I was able to move everything over and not have a cost me anything. That's one of the reasons why I didn't do anything initially, because that was like, if I went to some other some other cloud vendors, yeah, it'd be free for like a year, but then I had to start paying for it. And this the site does, it doesn't generate any revenue. For me. It's just something that I do for the for the league that I'm in. And I discovered the OCI in the always free tier. And I was like, Oh, my God. And I've actually been running that now. I guess, I think it's about six years, I've been running on OCI, and I haven't a single penny for the one caveat is with the ARM architecture, and that's actually relatively new. So initially, I actually had regular Intel based VMs, or compute instances that I was running everything on, it was fine. And I wanted to use the ARM architecture, because it allowed me to make them a little bit beefier if I needed to. And I had a hard time. And again, this, it could be fixed now. But when I first tried it, I had a, I had a very difficult time getting Lucy running, actually getting an installed on the ARM architecture. Oh, thankfully, command box makes it very easy to run those types of instances on the ARM architecture without actually having to install it. So I actually use command box on the the the compute instances, I have to run the site. And like I said, I'm using I forget what it might be five to eight, nine possibly, is the the version of Lucy that, and I know that people are going to be screaming, yes, I know what's behind. But it's one of those things where I don't, you know, it's like this, this website gets used a lot, like three months out of the year. And then it kind of sits idle for though it's not really a priority at this point for me to to make sure everything's completely updated. So
Michaela Light 32:49
Make sense. I would say for people listening, I do recommend updating Lucy or ColdFusion with hotbeds because, you know, there's security issues that are out there. And you really don't want to have your site hacked, it can be very upset.
Scott Stroz 33:05
Follow in my footsteps there.
Michaela Light 33:08
But you're not alone. There are a lot of people don't update their version, you know, about over everything, you know, whether it's Lucy or Adobe ColdFusion or MySQL, or SQL Server or right, at least on the cloud, they deal with the operating system, you don't have to worry, patches to that, that's all dealt with. And you didn't mention that earlier, I my understanding with with Oracle Cloud and all these cloud providers, they do quite a good job of keeping the things secure. Absolutely, they applied
Scott Stroz 33:41
in from from the MySQL heat wave site. So when you if you create, if you're running MySQL and Oracle Cloud as the database as a service, you it is impossible without jumping through a lot of hoops to access that database server from the internet. So, so your you know, you don't have the database ports exposed to the internet, they're only exposed internally. So yeah, if you have your web application server in the same subnet, it's easy to connect them. It's easy to talk to each other, but you won't be able to actually have you know, without doing other steps, like I actually have a bunch of instances that I play around with for work. And the way I access them is I actually created a compute instance, where I installed open VPN. So I have an open VPN client on my on my laptop. And when I want to connect to my heatwave instances for the werkstoffe, I connect to the VPN and then I can actually just connect as if I, you know, was literally sitting in the same network. But by default, you can't access any MySQL heatwave instances from the internet you actually have to go through and manually do stuff whether it's, you know, setting up a VPN like I did or there's other processes there's, there's Bastion can elections that are, you know, I'm limited so that you can have access to do stuff, but then the Bastion goes away, or it makes it to the edge, I don't know if the game ever goes away or comes disabled, or just starts throwing errors if you try to connect beyond the time that the Bastion is supposed to be set up. So in terms of security that way, it's, it's, it's great. Sometimes it's a bit of a pain, because I'm like, you know, why can I hit the server? Oh, because I'm not connected to VPN, like, you know, those types of things, it still hasn't, you know, connecting to the VPN to connect to the database servers that I'm running hasn't really solidified in my, my mental workflow for for doing stuff. But and, you know, with compute instances, the default communication is over SSH. And that gets set up automatically. As a matter of fact, when you create a compute instance, you can generate SSH keys where you can use existing keys that you that you might already have to make it easy to connect over SSH.
Michaela Light 36:03
Very importantly, you know, so much hacking happened, even you might get that thing last year where a bunch of fights got hacked, and Corporation. Very important. Pay attention already.
Scott Stroz 36:19
I've seen up to basically,
Michaela Light 36:22
And make backups. So if you did, unfortunately, get hacked, you can't be held for ransomware. Right? And, and have a disaster recovery plan that you actually test out occasionally and try and stand up. And this is one of the other advantages of cloud, right? Because if you if you're on physical hardware, and you have a disaster recovery plan, your disaster recovery plan is you've got to stand up some server somewhere you you're writing stood pre stood up servers somewhere. If you're on cloud, and you've got your images back, you can should be able to just press some buttons and redeploy to another cloud instance in another data. So absolutely,
Scott Stroz 36:59
You can end with MySQL Heatwave, you can actually do point in time recovery. Oh, so you can actually say I want to recover this database to 10:53am yesterday. Wow. And it'll, it'll be able to restore. Now you do have to make sure that that's enabled when you set up the instance, which I think it's actually enabled by default, but I can't remember.
Michaela Light 37:26
Yeah. I mean, I think my experience is cloud stuff generally doesn't go through a disaster quite as often as physical hardware does not the physical hardware does it that often but right, you know, I've been around long enough, I've seen it happen that, you know, hard drive goes out or from human element was involved, and it was a door carp. But that can happen on Cloud is a lot rarer. But it's easier to recover.
Scott Stroz 37:53
Right. And Cloud providers, I think, have much better monitoring than a lot of people do when they have stuff on premise. So I think they're able to identify a problem before it actually becomes a problem. I frequently get get emails from Oracle Cloud, saying, Hey, we noticed a problem in your tenancy, but we're working on fixing it. And I'm like, Okay, I didn't even notice anything. You know, so it's like they, it seems like the cloud providers are able to head off a lot of potential issues before they actually impact a lot of customers. And the what you said about having a disaster recovery plan is something that I tend to preach a lot about, even though I'm not a DBA I still talk about that. Because you're I mean, you're right. And I've known a lot of people who are like, oh, yeah, we have a disaster recovery plan. Have you tested it? No. And you know, we're past
Michaela Light 38:49
It and you discover someone changed one of the passwords and things sack month ago, and now it doesn't work or, or what happened to me up or you thought they wouldn't message in the source control where they really weren't, or you'd be amazed how many human factors can happen in these things?
Scott Stroz 39:06
Or what happened to me years ago on a job was the backup media failed. Yeah, that happens. And it's like, okay, yeah, the backup succeeded. But it's unusable. What do we do now? You know, so
Michaela Light 39:24
No, I I remember once working with a client and they had a really sophisticated backup plan they had like nine sets of tapes I forget what cadence they had you know, once a day and then every week was an off site whatever and blah, blah, blah. And then the human came in I won't name the humans name and they tried to restore on the first one failed and they pick the wrong option. Instead of picking restore, they pick this boy tape guys through eight of the tape. And finally there someone else that you know, can we look at it before you try the final and night the only remaining backup And then they discovered they not, you know, it'd been failing to restore for human elements. Wow. These things happen, you know, indeed,
Scott Stroz 40:08
Yeah. And it's, it's really, really important to do it and it makes it a lot easier in cloud. You know, there's there's way you there's ways you can actually configure MySQL heatwave to be what they call high availability. So if you create a MySQL ewave instance, in Oracle Cloud and you say I want it to be highly available, then we will actually create it will automatically create an instance in every availability domain, specify one of them as the primary automatically replicate, replicate the data to the secondaries. And if the primary goes down, it automatically failover to one of the secondaries. And that's something that, you know, that's called literally, literally a couple of mouse clicks, when you're when you're spinning up your instance. That would take a lot more work.
Michaela Light 40:58
Yeah, we're setting that up with, you know, a master slave thing. And, you know,
Scott Stroz 41:05
Primary, primary, secondary, we don't use master slave primary. Oh, okay. Sometimes its source and replica. Yes.
Michaela Light 41:15
So okay, well, I'm not very into that kind of, we mustn't use certain words Council culture thing, but I get why people get upset. But the point I was trying to make is, if you've got two different data centers, and you're trying to keep synced, it's a bit of a headache to set up. Yeah,
Scott Stroz 41:35
it could be. In a way, the way a lot of data centers are shut up. I know, like in Oracle Cloud, we, you know, they have regions. No, there's there's a lot of places, I have an Ashburn region. And then inside of the region, we have what's called availability domains. And what a lot of people may not understand is, even though the availability domains are in the same region, they're not in the same building. And they're usually fed by completely different sources. So inside of a region, you might have three availability domains that are completely separate from each other. So they get their power from separate places, they get their internet connection from several aces so that if one of them goes down, it doesn't affect the others.
Michaela Light 42:17
Yeah, I have seen data centers set up that kind of way. Were from my cold fusion ISPs. That was my ISP, in Baltimore, like, toured their data center a long time ago. And it was amazing the redundancy they planned into the systems they had, I mean, human systems, you know, to make sure things were running good. And now, you migrated this site from a VPS. And it was a Lucy site, right? Is that? Yes. Yeah. And it was running on my sequel on the BPS, or?
Scott Stroz 42:47
Yeah, they actually, were both running on the same machine. Okay,
Michaela Light 42:51
and so what what were the issues you had in migrating up to Oracle Cloud that you had to solve?
Scott Stroz 42:56
So the biggest issue I had to solve initially was getting them set up on separate instances. So at the time, when I first started MySQL, heat wave, we that wasn't an offering. So that's how long I've been, I've been hosting this. So I had to set up another instance for my database. So I had, I have two instances that I use one for the webserver, one for the database that runs my SQL community. And really, the the biggest issue was I had to go and I had to change the data source to point to a different IP address rather than localhost. And that was really it. And then when I when I switched to the ARM architecture is when I had to go through and, and use command box to get Lucy to run or more to the point to be installed, because I couldn't install it with the ARM architecture back then again, it could be fixed right now, where I'd be where I wouldn't need to use that. But it's been such it's been such a part of the way I'm doing it at this point that I don't think I'd ever go back even if it was supported.
Michaela Light 44:05
Hey, you make it sound like it's like you it's almost press a button and you could move to the Oracle Cloud Hosting. It don't have to pay. It's I don't know if you're in that CF program is Facebook group. There's been a lot of discussions about who to host with and Oh, yeah. Because one of the hosting companies has been having issues as you, you know, I'm gonna not say their name. But yeah. But a lot of people are, you know, every other week someone says, oh, who should I move my hosting to? And maybe Oracle Cloud is an option in there.
Scott Stroz 44:41
A lot of times when I see those posts, I do offer I do say, Listen, you know, first of all, full disclosure, I work for Oracle, but Oracle Cloud has has an amazing, always free tier and you can very easily spin up instances that are going to be able to run you know, decent sized Have ColdFusion applications pretty easily?
Michaela Light 45:02
Yeah. Because there are some people who they have, you know, a bunch of small clients, and each of those small clients will be fine. They could make it open, there are a call, I don't know how many sites do you think you could get on one of these free tier things
Scott Stroz 45:17
That know that. So if you, if you use the ARM architecture, and you configured all your resources to one, you're talking, you'd have the equivalent of four CPUs and 24 gigabytes of RAM.
Michaela Light 45:29
Oh, that's pretty beefy.
Scott Stroz 45:31
Yeah, that's a pretty beefy, it's a pretty beefy server. I mean, you're not going to be able to run, you know, sites like LinkedIn, on something like that. But there's probably, I don't
Michaela Light 45:43
Think the owners of LinkedIn would permit it to be run on Oracle Cloud, getting the owners.
Scott Stroz 45:51
I was talking about the size of the instance, not necessarily where it was located.
Michaela Light 45:55
But if you just have some, you know, small business sites or nonprofit site, you probably could put quite a few on.
Scott Stroz 46:02
Yeah, I would imagine. So. And again, a lot of it depends on the efficiency, the code and stuff like that,
Michaela Light 46:09
Well, you can, there's nothing stopping a small business, your client, your client could open their own Oracle free tier account a bit more, and then you just manage to do that. And then you get
Scott Stroz 46:19
When you, when you create an Oracle Cloud account, you can actually allow other people to come in. So like for my personal account that I use for the golf League, the one of the people that has access to that as my son. So if I ever needed needed his help with something, or I couldn't get to something and the server was down, he could actually log in and see what was going on. So you can you can grant access to other people even in your free even in your free tier. Very cool. Yeah.
Michaela Light 46:46
Now, I think it's exciting to have a totally free hosting cloud option available for you know, smaller sites or private, you know, personal sites or open source project. We were talking, I just want to pivot a little here. You said you were a paramedic, which kind of blew my mind because ColdFusion programmers slash non DBA DBA. I guess a paramedic, you're saving people's lives and rushing them off to hospital. So I guess that could overlap with being a DBA. On occasion.
Scott Stroz 47:21
Yeah, I was a paramedic for 14 years before I became a developer.
Michaela Light 47:23
Yeah. Wow. Did that. Do you think that's helped you in your development career, you had that experience?
Scott Stroz 47:30
Absolutely. And it's, it's actually funny, you mentioned this, and for anybody listening, we did not talk about this earlier. But I have actually been working on put together a keynote session that I've submitted to several different conferences, where the crux of it is, if you came into tech, from other career, how you can tap into skills, and attitudes you may have learned in that other career to make you better in tech. And I think there's a lot of things that I learned as a paramedic, that makes me good as a developer. And like, one of the things I tell people all the time is, you know, when production is down, and, you know, you're the person that has to fix it. So something is wonky in production, and you happen to pick up the phone. That's pretty stressful. That can be, you know, especially if you're dealing with, you know, high volume, financial information, you know, that's, it can be a very stressful situation. And if you're not used to working under stress that can make it much more difficult to get through the problem. Well, I don't think I'll ever be in a more stressful situation than performing CPR on the father of the bride at the reception in front of 300 people. Oh, my goodness, that was an so for me. That's the heat stress. Are
Michaela Light 48:52
You saying he coded it was passing me not alive? The code giveaway thing they call it? Right? It
Scott Stroz 48:58
Depends a bunch of different places. But yeah, he said, we were doing CPR on him. He laughs right in the middle of the dance floor.
Michaela Light 49:07
Even though people are panicking, you have to stay calm. The point you're making. Yeah, keep on holding, maybe taking a bit and telling them to back off when they are getting
Scott Stroz 49:18
Exhausted. Yeah, and that's, you know, it's one of the things where it's like, you know, and I've actually done that with so that's, you know, is that is that is stressful. That is like you know, I don't think I've ever been more stressed than I had been on those particular points. Really? Yep.
Michaela Light 49:36
I've seen people code I was an event with Code Blue the heart stop beating someone I didn't do the CPR but you know, someone else was doing it but and I you know, my I haven't been a paramedic, I've, you know, I did yoga, teacher training and meditation, whatever. So I do tend to be pretty calm and quotes high stress situations. And then one time I was at an event in a kind of deserty, part of New Mexico and a tornado mini tornado came by and we were all you know how they have those bustable things, they're not real. And we're like, oh, look at that. It's so cute. And then it comes to this big marquee, like a wedding tent type thing. And the tornado kind of hits it. It killed the tornado tornado collapse, but it collapsed the tent as well, with 50 people underneath. And there were quite a few injuries and panic. And I was pretty calm, I just went and help people as best I could. But then afterwards that, you know, about two hours later, after I'd finished helping people, that's when I kind of freaked.
Scott Stroz 50:43
That's, that's not uncommon, you know, a lot of like, one of the things like when, when we had incidences like that, where, you know, there were a lot of people around or there were a lot of people hurt, ya know, they're looking to you. Yeah, to, to make not necessarily make sense. But to try and bring the temperature down. You know, so if, if you walk into a scene, and you're all amped up, that's gonna make everybody else more amped up, which is going to make your job harder. So I always tried to, you know, first of all, I never ran. Because to me when you're running like when, when I see like, EMS workers on TV in the running, I'm like, No, that's That's stupid. Because that shows to me, that shows you're out of control. It doesn't show you're in control of situation. If if there's chaos raining down, and you walk in calmly, guess what? That brings the temperature down. And people now look to you. Okay, this guy knows what he's doing. So we're going to listen to it, we're going to listen to what they have to say,
Michaela Light 51:47
And if you're a programmer with a bug, because the site's down on the people in the company are upset, that's probably a good way to behave.
Scott Stroz 51:55
Yep. Yeah. Because again, if you, you know, if you're working on a bug trying to, you know, try to get production back up, and you're freaking out, that's gonna make the people above you not feel good about the situation. Yeah, just
Michaela Light 52:06
Like the daughter of the the boxer who was, you know, having a heart attack, he doesn't want to have the CPR, paramedic, freaking out? Exactly. They remember my training, right? Or is it the left hand or the right, you know? No, it was calm competence? And you
Scott Stroz 52:24
Know, exactly. And that, you know, it's one of them. That's like, that's just one thing that that I think, you know, helped me become a better developer, I actually have always prided myself on my troubleshooting skills. And I think a lot of that comes from doing you know, in medicine, you do what's called a differential diagnosis. So you won't get some information. And you come up with an idea. And they all gather more information if he or see if your idea is correct. And if our ideas not correct, well, then you got to come up with another idea. And then so so differential diagnosis is more, you keep checking for things. And when you realize that, you know, it can't be something, then you knock it off the list. Until eventually, what's left is the only thing that makes sense.
Michaela Light 53:08
God, that makes sense. But debugging?
Scott Stroz 53:13
Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's really, you know, that's kind of like, you kind of get a sense like this. This kind of sounds like a network issue. Or it kind of sounds like it's an environment issue. So like, it happens on one server doesn't happen on another server type thing. And, you know, you just that and that's kind of the way I work through when I'm when I'm tackling bugs is, you know, I, you know, I taking what's happening, okay, so what, what, what's happening, what's expected to happen? And be like, Okay, this sounds like it could be this, and then you test to see if it is that and then when you're like, oh, it's not that, but then you're like, oh, but now I have more information. Now, it could be this. And you keep going through that iterative process. And it's very similar to, you know, when you have a patient that's presenting with symptoms, that could be any number of issues that
Michaela Light 54:07
Lie down on the floor, not conscious, but if heart stopped, because they had, you know, some food allergy. Exactly.
Scott Stroz 54:16
You just kind of keep knocking stuff off the list, but, but you got to try and prioritize that list so that it makes sense. You know, that what's the most what's the most likely scenario here? That right? That's the problem.
Michaela Light 54:31
Right? And then you focus on that find the evidence, is this really true? Did this fixed and make it better? Or, oh, maybe it isn't. Maybe we need to go to the second possibility here. Right? Try it. And
Scott Stroz 54:43
Sometimes there's multiple things going on. So you fix one thing and you're like, oh, wait, that problem is gone. But now there's another one and that's it's the it's the same thing in medicine. Sometimes, you fix one thing and it exposes another issue.
Michaela Light 54:58
Definitely happens with debugging you You know, it's like Whack a Mole. Sometimes you pick one thing. And then that reveals, particularly with performance tuning, I find if the server's running slow or crashing, you get rid of one database issue, and then you discover that some locking issue in the code or whatever the thing is, so yeah, often, and it even in debugging can be true. So very true. Give you I've got to believe in paramedics, you kind of access your intuition as to what you should do. It's not necessarily totally rational, thought process you'd like you just get a feeling as to what you should do first or,
Scott Stroz 55:39
Right. Yeah, it's an unfortunately, it's not something that can be taught. And that only comes with experience. And like, another thing, like something that you hear in medicine a lot is when you're when you hear hoofbeats don't look for zebras. And basically, what that means is I get you know, if you're presented with something, then look and see if it's the most likely thing first, right, you know, but where the experience comes in, is, when you get that gut instinct that I know, it's not that. I can't tell you why I can't quantify why, but I just have a feeling it's not that it's down. And, and that's something that it just it comes with experience. You know, I've, I've seen, I saw 1000s of patients in my career. So I had a lot of different things, you know, go wrong on calls, or where we thought it was one thing, one thing another thing. And, you know, that's just you know, and it's kind of the same way with coding, like, nobody's gonna come out of school and be a great coder. Not gonna happen. You learn to be a great coder, by coding, and buying, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. Yeah, you know, and constantly learning and evolving how how you do things like I have a way that I like to code, but it's not my way. It's a way that I pieced together from a bunch of people I've worked with over the years, that, you know,
Michaela Light 57:07
Just learning from your mistakes, if you're lucky you with a team and you get to see other people's code and see other people's mistakes. And you do or whatever you call it. Post Mortem, post mortem. Yeah, yeah. But I think there's pretty a term code review, I think what we, you know, you do something where you look at what other people did, and you learn from what other people did, or you help them understand, well, maybe that's not the best way to code that or whatever. So it's,
Scott Stroz 57:33
it's, it's funny, I was on a project. Before I joined Oracle. And I was brought on the project because of my expertise in CF, then the project was using CF to set up basically micro services to power an Angular js app. And we did regular code reviews. And they most of the developers did not like when I reviewed their code. We didn't, why not? Because I would find a lot of things wrong with it. And I will admit, isn't that good? Well, yeah, but they always felt bad, because it's like, you know, Scott never has to fix his coat. And I always had to fix mine. I'm like, Well,
Michaela Light 58:13
I mean, you know, someone not wanting to go to the dentist, because they're afraid The dentist might find some things that need fixing, and they don't go to dentist 10 years, and then their whole mouth falls apart. Because they didn't go to the dentist. I mean, wouldn't it be better to just go every six months for a little preventative checkup and find my problems in your code, preventative ly. And, you know,
Scott Stroz 58:35
It's funny, they were there was one guy, one developer, who, like any pay said this multiple times, in the three years, I was on the project. And they were like, I always like reviewing Scott's code, or getting my code reviewed by Scott, because I always learned something. Like, whether it's a new way, you know, like, he like he never had used ternary operators before. And I love ternary operators, I use them all the time. And like, the first time he did curfew, he was like, what's that? Like, that's turning up, right? He goes, how's it work? And I told him, he's like, he's like, Oh, that's nice. And then he started using MX, you know, and it was just one of those things where, you know, the, like, I say, people didn't want me to review their code. That was I mean, I, you didn't get a choice. You like you couldn't pick who reviewed your code. It was kind of assigned, you know, and I think it's
Michaela Light 59:32
A bit because different people have different things they spot, you know,
Scott Stroz 59:36
Right. Right. And, you know, for me, it's like, I tend to think beyond what the problem is. So if there's a particular issue where there's a new feature that needs to be added. I don't want to think does it just solve this problem, or does it solve these problems? And if it solves these problems, we need to make sure that that particular snippet of code can handle multiple different things and not just a specific thing that we're looking at right here. And I think that's what, what a lot of developers, especially younger developers, lack, because it's not something that's really taught, I don't even know it's something that can be taught is to think, bigger picture. So I've worked on projects where developers were like they had blinders on. And if they had to do something, they did it just so it fulfilled the requirements that they were given. And they don't think to themselves, is this something somebody else can use? And if it is something somebody else can use? How can I write it in a way to make it so that it solves my problem? And solves the errors?
Michaela Light 1:00:39
Yeah, that is a skill. I mean, I think experience on open source can help with that. Absolutely. I mean, we put out in our state of the union survey using open source and your company, or, you know, is it allowed or whatever, I encourage everyone to do a bit of open source stuff, either with code in your company if you're allowed to. Because if you've solved a simple little problem inside your organization, why not share it with others, you know, and the reason is, putting it out, there will probably make it better code, because you're going to do a little bit of a better job on the code to start with. And then other people will give you feedback or pull requests and yep, you know, absolutely
Scott Stroz 1:01:18
Get better. So should I tell? That's what like, I've I've had several conferences where there's been students that were there, and I get to talking to them, and they were like, you know, what do you think is the best thing I can do? You help? Before I get into an interview, I said, Take every line of code you've ever written and put it on again. I said, even if you think it's bad, put it out. Right? I said, because what's going to happen is people will see it. And if it's not good, for lack of a better word, then they're gonna let you know. And then you're gonna learn something. Instead, now you have to remember when you do that, you gotta, you gotta put on some thick armor, because some people can be mean and nasty in their comments and be like, This is stupid. This is horrible, rather than offer constructive criticism. But yeah, when you do get those constructive criticisms, that's how you learn. We don't learn from our successes. We've learned from when don't succeed, probably
Michaela Light 1:02:14
Learn more. I mean, the same thing. I'm sure when you were a paramedic, you had one or two patients who actually croaked on the on the, you know, in the process,
Scott Stroz 1:02:22
More often than not, probably when, well, when TPR was done, probably more often than not, yeah.
Michaela Light 1:02:28
And you can't take it personally, you learn from it, you do your best you can. But the whole point is you like, Okay, I maybe there's something I could learn here, either the approach, right? I mean, you can't save everyone, right? I mean, that's one of the lessons I think you learned, right? There were just some people who are ready to go to wherever people go after they die. It's just their time. Yeah, it's just that time to go to heaven. And there are other people it isn't their time. And you were telling me the story about I don't care. Okay, sharing this on the show, but you said there was someone who tried to kill themselves a few times. Yeah,
Scott Stroz 1:03:07
I had, it was a female patient, and I just happened to be working all there are these three times, then she tried to kill herself. Now. I don't want to be little this. But there are times when people make it look like they're trying to kill themselves. And it's kind of like a cry for help. It's kind of like, I'm at my wit's end. And this is something I'm actually considering. But they don't really. That's pretty cool effort. It is very common. And I don't like when people get the little for that, because to me, that's like, that is like the ultimate cry for help. Because the next time they get like that, guess what, they're not going to cry for help. They're going actually going to do it. But she would this was not that all three times. She, like had thought out what she was going to do when she planned it. And just things went wrong, like so the first time. She decided she was going to take a bunch of pills, and drink some alcohol and that she would just go to sleep and never wake up. The problem was she drank too much. She wasn't used to drink in and she vomited, and she vomited up most of the pills. So while she did go to sleep, she did eventually wake up as well. The second time she actually got a hold on a family member's gun, and she went out into the woods behind her house. She put the gun to her head and she pulled the trigger and the gun misfired. So she wanted to put like burns and stuff on her hand and nothing, nothing else happened. And then the third time, she was on a highway and she stepped in front of a bus and the bus was actually able to not stop completely but slow down enough to the point where when it hit her, you know, it gave her some bumps and bruises but didn't cause any long lasting damage. And I was I was working all three times she did this and I was in the back of the ambulance with her all three times. And then the third time she was like you want Just think I'm ridiculous. And I'm like, I don't think you're ridiculous at all, I just want you to realize that the universe isn't done with you yet. You're you're meant to be here. You're not meant to leave us yet. And as far as I know, she never attempted it. Again, this was actually in a small coastal town in New Jersey, and the groups of medics that we, you know, we all work with, we're, we're kind of tight knit. So we all kind of knew, like the frequent fliers, and that was a girl that people knew about, because, you know, what are the odds that same person me was on all three times? So I had never heard anything else that happened with her. So um, I'm hoping that, you know, she continued on and, you know, died eventually, if natural causes if she's not still alive?
Michaela Light 1:05:47
Yeah, I think there's usually a message there. In this, I've interviewed people who've had near death experiences where they coded their heart stop beating for some period of time, you know, in the, in the case of that they actually saw some lights, or some dead relatives, you know, met with God. And they really liked it. They said, Oh, this is great place, can I stay in God's like, nope, not your time, you need to go back. And write here are some tips. In the case of this woman I interviewed or this is another podcast I have. And I'll put it in the show notes for anyone that's curious on it. She was trained, she was at school, university, and she was trying to be an attorney, she didn't really enjoy it, she was doing a lot of drugs. This is how she, she died, she was driving a car high, had an accident, broke her back in three places, died on the operating table. Remember details of what was on the operating table? I mean, you know, she was unconscious, done that. And then yeah, she was told to come back and be a teacher. That's what she did. And now she's a lot happier. Wow, happy being an attorney, nothing against attorneys to enjoy it. But, you know, it wasn't for her. So it's quite amazing. But I just want to say that, you know, same with some programs, you know, some programs, it's their time to die. Sometimes, like get a reprieve. And I think that's the case with cold fusion, you know, the same could be a bit of a, I don't know, that cold fusion coded. But it did have a bit of a hiccup around CF nine, you know, 12 years ago, whenever it was. And it does seem to I don't know, if you were there, the paramedic got or someone else was, but I think the folks at Adobe and Lucy just and autists and me at Terra Tech, and you know, a few other folks out there just said no, we're not gonna let this language die we're gonna write,
Scott Stroz 1:07:49
It's still gonna be you know, I
Michaela Light 1:07:51
Yeah, I
Scott Stroz 1:07:51
Have to say a lot of the stuff that, or just puts out is fantastic. Like, I love command box. Like, to me that's just like, you know, somebody's like, Hey, can you help me troubleshoot this issue? What version? Is she ever using? Oh, well, you can't download anymore. It's, I don't care. Just tell me what version you're using, you know, because you can use command box just spin up an instance and, you know, look at their code. And it's just, I, I love tools like that. And I wish that's something that we had in the CFX world years and years and years ago. But the the CF community, while I'm not as an active member, as as I was before, has always been deeply passionate about the language and the ecosystem. And I think what Luis and everybody else at orders has has done is kind of elevate everybody. Absolutely. You know, and I just, it's it's nice to see, you know, from from somebody who now who, you know, I promote an open source and open source product, because I'm actually on the community team, my main focus is supposed to be the open source version, but we do and a bleed over and talk about some of the other stuff. I really like a lot of what the CF community is doing. And I it's funny, I've been doing a lot of node coding recently. And more than once, I've thought to myself, This is what the CF community could have been with all the different node packages that are available. You know, it's like if you want to try and do something with with computer code, there's a better than fair chance there's a node module to accomplish that so you don't have to you know, rewrite, or you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And like there's been so many times like I thought that myself and like why if CF was like this, I I'd still be using it all the time. And I haven't I haven't been as involved so I don't really know a whole lot about some of the differences of you know, what's what's come about in the most recent versions of CF, you know, other than like The big highlights I'll see coming across Facebook or you know, on LinkedIn. But there was a time with CF where they come out every year that or every new version that'd be features. And they'd be like, I have no use for that. Or, you know, it's it's funny, you said CF nine, I want to think, I think CF nine was when the flash phones came out, was that nine? Or is that eight?
Michaela Light 1:10:26
I don't remember what version flash what
Scott Stroz 1:10:28
Mic either, we wouldn't ever flash what's going on? Like, wow, this is really like, wow, Flash ROMs are really cool, this is neat. And then you hit that 25 kilobyte size restriction and you're like, Okay, this is now useless. I can't do this now. You know, so if you made a form that was too big, it would throw an error, because the actual generated file couldn't be larger than, like, 25 kilobytes or so. But, you know, I, it's, I just, I still, like, what the people in the community do, even though I'm not using the language everyday like I used to, it really makes me feel good to know that there are people who are still promoting and supporting CF CFML, whether it's, you know, ColdFusion, or Lucy. And just, it makes me feel good. Like, like, it's almost like, in a way, and this is going to come across as patronizing. And I don't mean it to be, but it's in a way, it's like watching your child grow. Like, some of the people that I know, are big into the community now, we're like just starting out, when I was more prominent in the community. So it's kind of, it's really cool to see, you know, see those people grow and become such a huge part of the community. That was a big part of my life for a long time.
Michaela Light 1:11:52
It's good. And if you're able to mentor people, or just encourage them in some way, it's great to see people grow and and do that absolutely, you know, share stuff on their social media or blog about it, or come on podcasts, anyone listening and wants to come on the podcast, just let me know, happy to chat with you and see if it's a good fit. Mostly it is. I am pretty open to interviewing folks who didn't know, Scott,
Scott Stroz 1:12:18
Indeed. And
Michaela Light 1:12:22
I think the I mean, to me, when I look at all the different programming languages, really most of them, there's quite a big overlap as to what you can do. Yes, sometimes it's easier in some languages and other like ColdFusion is good for rapidly producing stuff. But also, there's the importance of the ecosystem on all the tools that you have and packages that you have. And that's a big, I think, a big part of it. And then as you mentioned, the community of people is important, and how positive and supported a bit. That is. So I would suggest to anyone listening, if you haven't looked at Forge box and the packages on there, that's what is another autists thing, and it's kind of I think they kind of basically looked at what node packages did or what WordPress plugins that how can we do something similar in ColdFusion. So that's a good thing. There. And I think there's a lot of cross pollination between different languages and ecosystems, people see a feature of one language or two words, oh, how could we reproduce? Right? Good to have been going on. I mean, for me, confusion is definitely alive. We've got two major organizations, Adobe and Lucy foundation, you know, the open source side supporting it committed to doing new releases, new versions, Adobe's currently pumping out new version every year, Lucy puts out a monthly point release. So and then we've always, you know, into the box conference coming up in Washington, DC. In May, and you know, they always have new tools or analogous roadmaps. It's like very refreshing.
You when I've gone to that conference, oh, we've come away like, wow, you can do that in ColdFusion. And it's this tool. And you're right. And the same thing. There's a CF Summit East happening in Northern Virginia. That's in end of April, I think, another East Coast event. And then of course, we've got the CF camp in Europe in June and we've got CF Summit, West or Las Vegas happening later in the year as one or two other ColdFusion events and conferences happening around the world, I think was one in Malaysia and there's one in Latin America somewhere.
Scott Stroz 1:14:47
Nothing hold a candle to cfunited Oh, that's very
Michaela Light 1:14:52
Kind of you to say we'll see you tonight. It was very special conference. We had a lot of great help from all the staff that put it together and All speakers and sponsors, so it was very fun event but again, you know, I was very sad after cfunited in 2011 when it ended, but I think these, you know, events have a knack for lifetime right. You know, unfortunately that that was what happened there it got a bit of a fatal wound in the 2008 financial crisis and it kind of kind of limped along a bit. Right. But I'm sure it's in conference heaven, having a good time. The other conferences that ended Yeah. Oh, cool. Anything else you want to share? Before we wrap up here?
Scott Stroz 1:15:46
Now, I, you know, what I do I, for anybody who's younger, younger developer, and newer developer, who's who's kind of just starting out two things, one, don't get discouraged. Keep trying, keep learning. And two, don't be afraid to not succeed. And I actually said that to somebody and they were like, so don't be afraid to fail, like, no, don't be afraid not to succeed. Because a lot of times when you don't succeed, you're going to learn something. And if you learn something, there's no way that can be considered a failure.
Michaela Light 1:16:21
Absolutely. And it's always an experience, right? Yep. I would say it's worth trying stuff. In programming or anything, you're probably going to learn a bunch of new things, you're gonna make some new friends if you go about learning it with other people. But you're always going to have an experience and probably have a story to tell. Right? I mean, I'm sure you've had programming boats adventures where it was a total plaster F. But you've got a good story out of it. And you probably avoid doing the same thing against you probably did learn something from it.
Scott Stroz 1:16:55
Absolutely. Yeah.
Michaela Light 1:16:58
I think it's I don't know quite what the name for that attitude is, like, open mind to trying stuff for versus closed mind. I think I've heard it described that way. But definitely. I mean, for me, I've often thought, What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? You know, I know we're getting a bit deep here, people. And I think we're here to learn and grow and have experiences, you know, have different experiences. And that's basically it. You know, maybe other people have other views on that. That those are the two key things I picked up. And sometimes those experiences can be a bit dark.
Scott Stroz 1:17:47
Yeah. Especially working in EMS for 14 years.
Michaela Light 1:17:50
Well, even in programming, that can be some pretty, you know, one time I was an honoree, network admin on a back system. And I'd given permissions to some folders. And I was like, yeah, that's not good for security. I need to remove permissions. Well, I didn't realize I was removing permissions from the whole effing machine. The whole team of 50 people couldn't do their work like gates. Yeah, that was not, I was I didn't ever do that again. But the chief sysadmin, he was he must have been any, you know, an EMF or paramedic and a pest free because he was very calm. And he just said, Oh, well, no worries, we'll just restore the permissions. You know, 30 minutes later room was able to work again. And you know. Yeah, that was that was one of my more embarrassing little whatever. And I've done some pretty stupid things in programming over the years well, along with clever things, you know?
Scott Stroz 1:18:57
Exactly. So you'll learn. I'm going to
Michaela Light 1:18:59
Put all those you see if Oracle Cloud the URL for the free Oracle Cloud, which is so complicated, it's oracle.com/cloud/free. I don't know anyone could possibly remember it, we're going to put it on the show notes, the Terra tech.com site. The CFR URL is long and complicated, you're not going to find that online. I'm also going to put this for anyone feeling a bit depressed or suicidal that we did an episode with Jorge Reyes on called CF suicide on some tips to do that, and some resources. So I'm gonna put that in there because we did bring that subject up. And I'll put a link to that episode I did with the person who died and came back on my other podcast, intuitive leadership mastery. And I'll put a link to the into the box and CF summit conferences as well. So if folks want to reach you online, what are the best ways to do that, Scott?
Scott Stroz 1:19:56
Probably the best way is on LinkedIn. Pretty libro when it comes to accepting connection requests you can they can even email me directly at Scott that [email protected]
Michaela Light 1:20:12
I will put the URL for both of those in the show notes so people can easily find them. And thanks so much for coming on the show today, Scott. It's been a blast.
Scott Stroz 1:20:23
Thank you for having me. It's been really good kind of going down memory lane a little bit, but yeah, it was it. I enjoyed it. Thank you.