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Michaela Light 0:01
Hey, welcome back to the show here we have a special episode. And it's a panel of cold fusion user group experts. We've got Leon, Nolan and Daniel. So and we might have drew as well joining us, he isn't here yet. But if you pop in the middle, I'll introduce him there. And my name is Michaela light. This is the CF alive podcast. And today we're going to be looking about running or starting a cold fusion user group. So welcome, everyone. And if you don't know, our guests here, Leon runs the Seattle cold fusion user group. And Nolan runs a user group down in Mount Shasta area in California.

Sacramento, I'm sorry,

Nolan Erck 0:48
no worries, just it's just,

Michaela Light 0:49
it's just your company name has Shasta, and it gets me confused.

Nolan Erck 0:53
I had that happen before.

Michaela Light 0:55
Yeah. And then Daniel runs the circuit, Chicago ColdFusion user group. So we nearly got all the time zones covered in the United States. And if anyone listening, if you run a youth group, please let us know in the comments about it, we'd love to hear what you're doing. And if you're interested in starting youth group, let us know that in the comments. And if you just wish you could attend to us, or you can tell us that too. So I think we should start off by just explaining what is a ColdFusion user group or the acronym CPG that sometimes gets bandied around.

Leon O'Daniel 1:32
So you know, for, for my opinion, a confusion user group is a community of people that all have a common interest in cold fusion, and are interested in sharing their knowledge about cold fusion and about learning about opportunities and additional information in that area. also supporting technologies for cold fusion.

Nolan Erck 1:54
What he said,

Daniel Garcia 1:56
it's also a way for people just to get together network a little bit and see who's out there and learn about other cool new things. Maybe not just cold fusion, but anything in the in the web world.

Leon O'Daniel 2:06
Exactly.

Michaela Light 2:08
So it might might also be about database or CSS or other things that cold fusion developers are into.

Daniel Garcia 2:15
Yep, JavaScript. Front is a little bit.

Leon O'Daniel 2:19
Yeah, anything that you can sort of integrate with cold fusion? We recently did a presentation on integrating Twilio to do, you know, to build a conversion tracking application for marketing efforts. So yeah, pretty much anything that you know, would kind of fit into, you know, cold fusion we tried covering in our user group.

Michaela Light 2:39
Yeah. Go ahead,

Daniel. Sorry. So

Daniel Garcia 2:42
we've actually had some non computer developers attend some of our user group meetings, if it was a topic that wanted to hear about, like we did an ionic presentation. A while back, or even Camden came, as we had some people show up nothing to do with confusion, but like the topic and wanted to come out, and let's see what that was all about.

Michaela Light 2:58
Yeah, bit of cross cross promotion never does any harm, you never know, you might actually convert some of those people, or at least they'll know what cold fusion is when they leave.

Leon O'Daniel 3:07
Exactly.

Michaela Light 3:08
I think the other hidden thing about it is, you know, sometimes developers work on their own, they work home remote, or they're working in a company where they're the only cold fusion developer, it's a chance to get together with other folks who understand what the heck is you do? So I think that leads into a related question, why is a CPG important in 2019?

Unknown Speaker 3:35
user groups, tremendously important a sorry about that. Because it helps, the first thing is it helps to show that this technology is still relevant. In 2019. It helps to provide a sense of community that other developers, it's also a great forum to learn other tips and techniques. And we found that it's also really good to show out there to perspective from companies that might be trying to make a decision, you know, do we keep cold fusion in half, you know, as part of our technology stack, or bring it in that? Wow, there's actually, you know, user groups out there that are promoting this technology and discussing the technology.

Michaela Light 4:18
Yeah, I think that's true, there was a post that someone made recently, I'm spacing out on the guy's name, I think it was Mike Nolan, or someone like that. I'll look up the name later and put it in the show notes. But he asked his popularity and important measure for programming language. And I think user groups help show the, you know, cold fusion still has people enthusiastic about it out there. Oh, yeah.

Daniel Garcia 4:47
And kind of reiterate one of the points that were made, um, really the the monetization, of how to do things, the modern way, we have a lot of developers over the years, they've been doing coefficient long time, but they don't necessarily know the new ways of doing things, Rob toys are still on older versions, cold fusion. So one thing we try and do is, in fact, we just had Nolan, last month came in and presented on some more modern techniques, and really trying to keep the the developer cool current on how we should be doing things.

Nolan Erck 5:17
And the user group sessions can be a good way to do what Daniel just mentioned, especially for folks that for whatever reason, cannot get to the conferences, that happened a couple of times a year into the box, or cold fusion summit, or CF camp is too far away, or too expensive, or the dates don't work or whatever. Granted, you don't get 20 or 30 sessions in one day at your user group, but hits its one evening a month, if you can, you know, get there after work, you can also catch a lot of the same content or very similar content, like Daniel mentioned, I spoke remotely for his group and gave an identical talk there that I gave for at the end of the box crowd a few weeks earlier. So you can get a lot of the overlapping conference sessions that way to for people to can't make it out to those events.

Michaela Light 6:03
That's a great point. And that's also useful for speakers, if anyone who was a speaker at conferences, is listening to this, if you want to practice your tool conceit, you know, get some feedback on it. And giving it a user group before you give it at the conference is a great way to improve that how the tool goes. Absolutely.

Daniel Garcia 6:21
So we definitely welcome that. No. So

Unknown Speaker 6:26
that is one of the nice benefits of being in the position I'm in where I speak at a lot of the cold fusion conferences each year, and I also run a user group is I can sort of pencil myself in on the calendar when when I'm able to test drive my, my conference event or my conference talks, before I actually give them at CF summit or into the box, whatever. And,

Michaela Light 6:46
and often it's possible to give that talk remotely. So if you're not in Chicago, or Sacramento, or Seattle, or wherever else, the user groups that you related to, you know, you can do it remotely. So that that's not the way it works. If you're going if you're visiting that particular town where user group is that's an opportunity to, to both do some business or pleasure and do a user group meeting. In fact, I would say if you own a business, and you go give a user group talk, you just made that trip a tax write off. So you know. So user groups are really important if someone's listening is thinking of starting a user group. Let's talk a bit about that. Because we had some interest in the CFO live in a circle group from several people who wanted to start one but weren't quite sure how to go about it. So we've got seasoned experts here. They've had their user group for, I think, at least 10 years, in some cases, many years anyway. So what do you do if you want to start a user group?

Unknown Speaker 7:50
For me, the biggest challenge was finding a usable venue, me but we had, we've had to move when my group was the cohesion Music Group, we had to move between three or four different locations. And then since then it's morphed into the general web group sec interactive, the same requirements are there either way, you've got to have a room that ideally is free, or super cheap to rent every month, because you don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for an hour and a half session, it's got to be a place that you can bring food in and out of probably have some sort of Avi projection system, so at least already there or you've got some other means available that you can bring one in and it's got a room setup actually use that. And the venue actually has to be in a part of town that the developers will actually come to, for free after hours on their own time, we had issues where certain parts of town seemed like they would be just fine. They were off of a freeway in a venue in a room that had an AVI projector and everything was fine. But because of the side of town it was on. And in relation to how traffic flows at the end of the day, people just were not interested in coming there. So we've we have physically move the meeting 1015 minutes in a different direction sometimes to accommodate that sort of thing. And that that's been a big factor for us, like the right venue in the right part of town have been the big things that I need to, but I think everyone should sort out before can be too far down the path. I don't know what else. What else do you guys think?

Unknown Speaker 9:14
Well, we have the same sort of problem with this yellow cold fusion user group where we were originally meeting downtown Seattle. And for those of you that have ever driven around downtown Seattle, that can be a challenge, and especially around rush hour, and we would you know, run about a ceiling of gosh, you know, 10 or so people that would come to a meeting. And it just we weren't able to bump that up, we did something similar to what Norman was talking about where we moved all of our meetings over to the Seattle Eastside in Bellevue. And if you're a meetup pro member, and you have we work locations, it's a co working space that they have throughout the country, I think, perhaps worldwide, but you can have get free conference rooms have to have your cold fusion user group meetings, and it's worked out pretty well for us. So I didn't get

Unknown Speaker 10:10
that. But

Michaela Light 10:11
I went to a small event at a we work it was in Mexico City but sure is the same, you know, they do have projectors and space. The only downside is you have people who regularly go to work, they're kind of hovering around which you can either look at as a bonus, because they're going to pick up on the, whatever the topic is, or it can be a bit of an interruption.

Unknown Speaker 10:30
And they actually did have space for us. In the Bellevue, we work where it is kind of tucked away, and people aren't bombarding you. We typically hold our meetings at around six o'clock at night, though. So we have less people going into their co working spaces.

Unknown Speaker 10:45
We did the same thing. We're meeting in a venue called hacker lab, which is not we work properly. But it's a similar sort of venue. And so they have the AV production system setup for us there in central downtown Sacramento, which makes the traffic flow easy for most everyone. And the other nice thing about that is they also host a variety of other after hours classes and workshops, not just our meetup, but there's actually a hacker lab calendar, and they put our meetups on that calendar too. And we have had a few people come to our events because they saw not my promo, but they saw the hacker lab promo, and were interested in what we're talking about. So that helps to

Daniel Garcia 11:19
another place you want to start as well. I've been extremely fortunate with a sea fog, where the companies I've worked at had been more than happy to sponsor us. This is the second company I've been since I started it. And the company provides a meeting location or conference room, even sponsored the food. So definitely check with your current employer and see, Hey, is this something that you would like to sponsor, if you've got some confusion developers in your company, that's just a great way to get them to come out and try and work on their craft and learn more and do things like that. So it's definitely a win win.

Michaela Light 11:54
That's a great suggestion. I know when I ran the Maryland cold fusion us, we used to do that. I don't know several other user groups to do that. The other thing I'd say, you know, if you're thinking of starting a user group, the important thing is to get started, don't feel you have to have the perfect location, you can always move it later if you need to. One point I had the user group meeting a local bar that didn't have a lot of traffic on Tuesday nights, and they were happy to exchange free space, and AV equipment in return for people understanding they need to buy some food and drinks. location. So a restaurant bar or cafe might work for that, if it's not busy at that time of day.

Unknown Speaker 12:39
Also have private rooms that can rent out for birthday parties and such. And I've seen a few user groups do that before it's too they'll have meetings out kind of like a bar or like a Panera Bread or a pizza joint of some sort. It's not a birthday party, but it's you know, 10 people in the room buying a pizza and the venue doesn't care. It's also,

Michaela Light 12:56
particularly if you pick a time of day when they're not busy anyway, and choose the night at 6pm. Bars generally a pretty empty all restaurants depends on the restaurant of cool, some restaurants are busy and evening. So

Unknown Speaker 13:08
I have a question for Leon and Daniel related to Daniel, what you just said a minute ago about the places you've worked at had, you've had good luck with them helping to host the meetings. How do I phrase this and not make it sound like I'm trying to antagonize things, I'd be curious to know how many roughly how many cold fusion employees work in both of your buildings. And what percentage of those employees actually show up to the meetings, the reason I asked that is we used to run the cold fusion User Group here in town, in a building in Sacramento that employed about 25 cold fusion developers, literally in the same room where they worked every day. And we'd have one guy show up from that group, to our meetings every month, he was our sponsor that stayed and you know, open the door and turn the lights on for us. But we could not get anyone else that you've been, it was literally walk 10 feet to the side and sit down and there's your meeting, and we couldn't get them to stay. And I'm curious, you run into similar situations and how you maybe solve that problem.

Daniel Garcia 14:04
We do run into that the first company, there's only a couple of us. So we both were there. So that wasn't as big a deal. My current company, we've got about 1516 computer developers, and we've got maybe a third to half the common any given given night, just depending on the topic, depending who's available, the weather, things like that. So you're going to get the people that generally want to learn more generally want to do more. And you know, but also some people have families and they don't want to take the time. And it is tough. But we've been very fortunate, we've had enough people from the company that kind of mix up the core of the group, and we pull in others as well. But um, all I can do is keep encouraging them have topics they're interested in. And hopefully they will want to show up.

Unknown Speaker 14:46
You said you mentioned you have like a third to a half, is it usually the same third to half that shows up? Or is it does it vary still, even among them?

Daniel Garcia 14:53
Over the years, it changes early on, some people that showed up early on don't show up as much anymore. So as we are new developers, new developers may be a little more excited and enthused about things. And it also depends on older developers, younger developers, they got families lives outside of work, things like that.

Unknown Speaker 15:11
Okay, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 15:13
Now, so in my case, it depends on whether we're talking about, you know, my theatrical use and user group or my going cold fusion community of practice. So we typically hold our phone cold fusion community practices around 11 o'clock Pacific. And we currently have about 260 members of which we get only 35 at any given time, come and join. But we kind of have a captive audience with people at work that it's like, work or an hour long session on cold fusion. And so that works pretty good. Now with the Seattle cold fusion user group, we typically run into getting the same people attending each time I'll tell you what gave us a big bump was when Alicia and Kishore came up and did the Adobe cold fusion breakfast a couple months ago, we ended up getting a whole bunch of new people attending our meetings for the very first time, because they were introduced to our user group at that breakfast, and it was a big help. But yeah, we run into similar challenges as you were talking about Nolan, where you know it the we get lulz, and it ends up being just the same people and and then you have other challenges, which I think we've talked about a little later with speakers and things like that.

Unknown Speaker 16:31
Thank you.

Michaela Light 16:33
I mean, we'll talk more about promotion later on. I think one thing that might help is just engaging the people and for start asking, Well, what, what topics Would you be interested in and giving them a little poll? You know, and when people will feel engaged and part of the group they're more likely to attend. The other thing is just if there are employees in your company, just ask them, Hey, what would it take for you to walk to attend this? And you might find out something you can change? Maybe you can't, you know,

Daniel Garcia 17:05
what one thing we try and do is fill least once a year, can I go to the group and say what would you like to learn about them based on some of that will reach out to different presenters. One other thing we do and every one of our meetings, is have a time towards the end, where it's an open forum, open q&a, hey, you've got a problem you're working on, you want somebody here that can help you just ask. And so even though they might come for the presentation, because the maybe them still, maybe they're not, but they're also there for the networking, and, hey, I need help. You're here in person, tell me what I can do. And we've done that several times with people.

Unknown Speaker 17:40
Yeah, we do the same thing, where at the end of each of our meetings, we'll go and we'll say, Do you need help with something that you're working on? And we'll have them pull up on screen where they might be stuck? And we'll try to get them through that right at the meeting. And we found that that's a pretty popular portion of each one of these, because it gives them actual, real, real reason to show up, like, Hey, I can get this problem solved, too. That's

Michaela Light 18:04
great. Thanks. Yeah. Did do I'm interested when when I had a user group I, I'd give out little paper sticker name badges that people would hand write their name on? Do any of you do that, or I just found a lot of developers are kind of shy. And just having seeing what someone else's name is seems to help them interact.

Unknown Speaker 18:27
I think that's something that we need to do more of in my user group. Now one thing we do is we do in around the room at each of our user group meetings, and we do introductions, and you know, your name we company. You How long have you been using cold fusion? And what are you hoping to get out of the user group? But I think that that's a great point, you know, to do name tag, so that after the introductions are done, and you're 30 minutes in, it's like, what was this new person's name? So right?

Daniel Garcia 19:01
Yeah, we didn't name badges early on. And then we kind of got away from that over time, just same people showing up. But we do anytime somebody new comes, we do go around the room, introduce yourself. Who do you know, how long have you skill fusion? And we also asked, What's a favorite feature of confusion? Fact? I'm still waiting for Nolan's reply from last month on that, but I'm just trying to get them feeling part of the group that, hey, we're all developers runs together.

Leon O'Daniel 19:26
Cool. So

Michaela Light 19:29
also, when you start a user group, what are your thoughts on, you know, how often to meet or what day of the week or what time of day, we kind of talked a bit about that Leon earlier, you have one that meets at 11am in work as one that meets after hours.

Unknown Speaker 19:46
Curious work Wednesday, middle of the week, Wednesdays, it's far enough away from you know, you know, Monday, Monday is not forget Monday, or Friday, you know, because you have people either coming off the weekend or going to the weekend, we get a lot of folks that have things going on Thursdays. But yeah, Wednesday seems to be kind of a sweet spot on that. And we typically hold our meetings, it's they start, we start at six. But that first half hour is for networking. And we provide pizza and refreshments. So people that are just coming in from work, they're you know, they're hungry. And it's like, they don't have to make a decision well, but I'm not going to get to eat if I come to the user group meeting. And so we start that at six o'clock, go for a half hour, and then we jump into the regular meeting where at that point, we start broadcasting on zoom for other attendees. That seems to work pretty good for us.

Daniel Garcia 20:42
Yep, we started on Wednesdays for a lot of years. And then just with the group kind of voted to switch to Thursdays, we do 630 to eight. And then again, we provide food as well. So you can kind of come in sign up, grab some pizza, or whatever, and then be there for the presentation. We were doing every month, and then that got to be a little difficult people are busy presenters. So we just recently switched every other month to try and space out a little bit more. And that was partly from feedback from the group, often they wanted to meet.

Unknown Speaker 21:12
We do a third Wednesdays of the month. And I try to be consistent and do it every month, except for December, because it's too close to the holidays. And occasionally the Thanksgiving date lines up. And that's too close as well. So we we always take December off, we sometimes take November off, but I try to be consistent and have a meeting third Wednesday of the month, every month. Just to be consistent and get people out. I found that moving the day around sometimes Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday, and so on, or switching the week from second Wednesday to third Wednesday. Those kind of things affected attendance. To be fair, leaving it on the same day also affects attendance. There are some people that just always have a standard obligation. Wednesday nights or third Wednesday of the month. They're always at some other event that it just happened to be at night. And so we did a similar thing to people at some point and said what nights work for you which nights do not. And then I think myself and the then co managers have just picked what seemed like a reasonable option among the feedback we had. And we stuck with it since done.

Daniel Garcia 22:12
Yeah, consistency is definitely key having the same time every month, we do the same thing second Thursday of the month.

Unknown Speaker 22:19
Yeah, I agree with that, you know, making sure that you have it at the same, you know, same date, you know, time each month. And then also along that line is to make sure that you have a backup presentation ready in case your main presenter fails. That never happens. You know, and, you know, because you don't want to go into that the light last moment say, you know, well, you know, our meetings cancel. And it's like, well, geez, you know, I scheduled this time to show up, and now they're not gonna have the meeting. So consistency is really important.

Unknown Speaker 22:48
Yeah, I find that that's kind of, yeah, I find that just one of the responsibilities of being the group manager is the manager needs to have some sort of can have a couple of cans slide decks at the ready in case you have to do something like that. And worst case, what we've also done in that position, or also, if we just don't have a speaker lined up, for some reason, once every about once a year or so we'll do like what we call a developer show and tell where there's not a main presenter for an hour. It's just the promo that goes out says, Hey, if you got something cool, you want to talk about for five or 10 minutes, bring it into that neat database query you wrote that you're proud of cool is that a JavaScript library you found last week that's doing some amazing animation thing you'd like in your app, great, bring that to you want to come show us show off an app you've been working on that finally went gold this week, you know, anything like that. And then that's a good way to get people that don't feel confident doing a one hour presentation to contribute something. And then you get a nice feel for Oh, there are five people in the group that all use this particular technology. Maybe I can hit one of them up later on to do a little bit more of an in depth look at whatever they did the five minute teaser version of tonight. And those things worked pretty well for us when we are stuck to and like the presenter bales or we can't find one up for some reason.

Daniel Garcia 23:58
That's a great idea we talked about try and do something like that as well. Another thing we do, or we're going to do is a workshop. So our next Seaford meeting, we're gonna do a command box workshop. Some of the newer members don't know what command box is how great it is, we're just going to bring the laptops in. So I'll do it together, kind of walk them through the basics together. So instead of a presentation, more of a hands on interactive workshop,

Michaela Light 24:23
that's a great thing to do helps people get their skills up. It's free training for them. It benefits the software you're showing off, whether it's the latest version of cold fusion, some cool features in their tool, tool like command box. So I know when I had these group I used to do the second Tuesday. And the reason was to avoid Thanksgiving and Christmas clashes. I deliberately picked up a number near the front of the month. But doing the first Tuesday didn't work because people forget that when that is they sort of need to get into a month before they start realize oh, yeah, it's user group time. So we talked a bit about speakers. I know that's a challenge sometimes people have, how do you get speakers? So let's talk about that. Because a lot of your tips were what do you do if the speaker doesn't show up? Or you weren't able to get a speaker? And your basic as was the show must go on?

Unknown Speaker 25:21
Right? Right? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 25:24
Well with for us, we use one, actually, if we adopt one of Nolan's techniques, which is to have smaller presentations built into our, into our meeting, so that if we have somebody build, typically the longest we'll have for a topic will be about a half an hour. So you know, we're able to kind of fill in around that if we have a problem, we do try to encourage show and tells a lot. So that can help. And then other just smaller topics of interest that have some relevance to cultivation, or just something else that's interesting that they might seem technology wise, or whatever else, or even Seattle wise for that matter, in our area.

Daniel Garcia 26:12
And one thing we haven't done we've talked about doing is just finding a presentation out there that's already recorded, and just watch it as a group. And that's something we want to talk about what are the explain different areas of it. Um, I certainly prefer a presenter that's more interactive. But um, but that's another thing, just watch someone else's presentation or a slide deck or whichever and talk through it.

Unknown Speaker 26:33
We haven't done that before my group. I think I'm not sure if

Unknown Speaker 26:39
of the other groups, but I'm in the spot where we have a co manager and his skill set and mine overlap some, but he deals with a lot of technology, very in depth that I don't deal with very in depth and vice versa. So between the two of us usually will trade a couple of messages out and say, any ideas for a speaker next month. And if we have people that can come and present with them up as much as possible, because that's just a win win all the way around. But we are a couple of times a year in the spot where we don't have a speaker that can do the June meeting or July meeting. And he and I will just sort of Rock Paper, Scissors it out and say okay, you Why don't you speak in June, and I'll speak in July. And we'll go from there. And during the show if we can find something.

Michaela Light 27:22
Another thing is to ask speakers from various cold fusion conferences, often if you email or message them on Twitter, they'll be happy to talk to you as a group, they may not be realized it was an option. So just messaged a bunch. Let me show to get some of them will say yes.

Unknown Speaker 27:40
Yeah, that's worked out pretty well for us were William Frank Hauser. He's our co organizer for the Seattle cold fusion user group. And he just reached out to Charlie or hard to see if he would provide a presentation on fusion reactor. And he was more than happy to oblige, and did a great job presenting to us last month. Just ask.

Unknown Speaker 28:00
Yeah, the worst they're going to say is no. And I've, I've never been in a spot where a presenter has flat out said no, without a legitimate reason. Like I just cannot do that particular date. That's usually the problems. I can't be in Sacramento that day.

Unknown Speaker 28:15
And then you ask somebody else, and then

Unknown Speaker 28:17
I'll just keep asking you

Daniel Garcia 28:19
what to go along with that. Don't limit yourself just to the confusion conferences. Again, we try to make our user groups a little more inclusive. Maybe there's a database topic, go check out a database conference and find a speaker from there and have them present. You don't have to limit yourself to just confusion.

Michaela Light 28:36
Yeah, I had good luck getting the Microsoft evangelist to talk about sequel servers latest version. A lot of companies will pay their you know, evangelist or speakers to come present a user group and even sponsor pizza or whatever. So also, the third party vendors for cold fusion, like integral and artists and

Unknown Speaker 28:59
found Dr.

Michaela Light 29:00
They usually pretty keen to get the word out about their products. And as long as it's informational and not turns into a sales pitch that, you know, can work good.

Unknown Speaker 29:11
We're fortunate in that Blue River. The folks that make me a CMS are here in Sacramento as well. They're literally right down the street from me. And they've come and given a demo of the latest version of mirror a couple of times for my group in the past too. And that works really well it's they don't have to drive very far or fly in from somewhere, it's really easy to coordinate. So if you happen to have a found do or fusion reactor tech company nearby that can give a demo of their product. That's a real easy way to fill a session. Another thing we've had very really good luck with is the local tech recruiters, often the tech recruiters will like to come and give an in depth talk about what the job market is like in your town. And I'll tell you here's what we're looking for in resumes right now. Here's what's companies local to you are hiring, here's which ones to avoid things of that nature. And the other nice thing about the tech recruiters is they often I want to sponsor the meetings and provide pizza and drinks and things of that nature because it gives them more opportunities to pass out business cards and do more, you know, networking with people. So we talked to a couple of the tech recruiting outfits here in Sacramento. And that's usually a good meeting for like, right after the holidays, January. nobody really wants to put together a presentation, there's still a little bit fried from the holidays, the tech recruiter guys, though, are raring to go and get their, you know, 2019 or 2020 plan going and they'll come and happily speak. And it's not a technical talk, but it's we actually have a really good turnout for those a pretty decent sized crowd will come figure out what the job trends are like right now.

Daniel Garcia 30:39
That's a nice idea. I know I've shied away from that, myself is always having a company sponsor us feels like letting a fox in the henhouse kind of thing. So I don't want to overly encourage a recruiter to come in and try and but if you don't have that kind of situation, that's a great idea. Also, I'm mentioning reach out to others, I attend my DPA and the company speak about sequel, you know, people, you know, other tech people does have to be cold fusion, have them come in and do a presentation. If they'd like.

Unknown Speaker 31:11
I love rate presentations, I think that's a great idea to know.

Michaela Light 31:15
Yeah, and they might be people in your company, or they might be just people you know, on Facebook or LinkedIn or someone you see, it makes a really good comments in a in a group or whatever. You know, again, you if you don't ask you, you can't hear Yes. And if you hear No, that's okay. Maybe they'll come back later, and be okay doing it. And generally speaking, when I've asked people are usually flattered that they're being asked, so sometimes, I have found with new speakers, they need some encouragement or help to want to do it. So that's part of the process of, you know, getting new people to speak at the user group. One of the other things I did it, you know, I had to come my own company was sponsoring this group, I wouldn't courage, you know, Caucasian developers who worked at the company to, you know, give a talk or give a short talk to help improve their presentation skills. So that's another thought. It's usually pretty terrifying. First time someone gives a talk. So making it easy for them. And low risk

Unknown Speaker 32:20
is one thing we do that tries to help encourage, sorry, miquela, I think I talked over them, go ahead and get your sentence there. One thing we do sometimes to try to help with that is, so our group is sponsored by Adobe, twice a year, they'll give us a Creative Cloud subscription that we can raffle off as a prize, or I think they don't quote me on this part, but they sometimes have given out like a coefficient license as well. And what we'll do, one of the things that used to bother me about running the group is we'd have attendance that was at a an average level of, let's say, five attendees each month, and on the month that we were doing the Free Software giveaway, a whole bunch of people that I had not seen all year long, would show up and try to win that prize. I felt like that's not fair to the people that are here all year long learning and contributing, and they've maybe spoken to the group a couple of times. So one thing we've done, both to minimize that effect, and also encourage people to speak more and contribute more to the group is when we do the raffles, they're weighted, if you show up to a one session per year, you get one ticket in the raffle, you show up to five sessions that you know, in that year, you get five tickets in, if you present at one of our talks, you get, you know, seven or eight tickets in the raffle. So the more you do, to get out of your comfort zone, the more you do to contribute to the community, the more you're rewarded with opportunities to try and win the prizes. And people seem to feel that's fair, and they seem to enjoy doing it when we when we've gone down that path.

Daniel Garcia 33:41
That's great idea.

Unknown Speaker 33:43
It is every day. Yeah. Another thing that we do is that, you know, for people that attend is if you are an active member in we define that as attending at least a user group meeting in the past three months, then we'll go and we'll promote you on the Seattle cold fusion user group website without headshot and bio and links to your resume, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, so that if there's a company or recruiter that might be looking for some talent, there's like, Whoa, you know, and searching cold fusion will come up first, Seattle's cold fusion, and it seemed to work pretty well. And you know, it's just one of the things that we're trying. I do like your idea, Nolan about the giveaways from Adobe. That's a good way to do that with the more attendance more tickets.

Michaela Light 34:32
You can also get giveaways from if you have a vendor or you know, spot sponsoring, they'll often get you know, with Microsoft comes off and they'll give away a sequel server license or enter or giveaway a fusion reactor license. So you can often get giveaways. Or if you can't get your ways leasing, get t shirts.

Unknown Speaker 34:54
I've had good luck on the training outfits like Linda calm and places like that women give you a subscription for you know, two months free three months free. And you can give those away as well. And that's of interest to more than just cold fusion people. But you can use that Linda subscription for whatever training you want. And again, the worst are going to say is no, and then you're no worse off than you were before sending that email.

Michaela Light 35:20
Cool. So I think we've kind of moved into from how you promote the user group, which is the next thing I want to talk about what other things do you do to promote apart from, you know, giveaways, and you know, how to get people to attend

Daniel Garcia 35:37
meetup, creating a meetup, having it out there that kind of helps promote itself for you. People do searches. I've had people find us not knowing who we were, but came up on their meetup. And so they came. So reaching out to do a LinkedIn search on hope Asian developers in the general area, reaching out to them letting them know, Hey, we have this crew love to see you there. Those kinds of things. You know,

Unknown Speaker 36:05
we try as many different, you know, social, you know, platforms as we can. We use Eventbrite, we use meetup, we use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we try to send out multiple notices about upcoming meetings, you know, not just an individual one, but one a couple weeks out, then what about a week out and three days out and day before and they have to try to encourage falls? Another thing that we were thinking about, and I want your guys thoughts on this, is we're thinking about, you know, trying in July doing a Facebook Live of one of our user group meetings, as they can, you know, that might be a good way to get in front of some people that wouldn't normally, you know, be you know, the people that might you know, that would attend your meeting, but would get additional exposure. What do you guys think about something like that?

Daniel Garcia 36:55
That's a great idea. would you would you have a in person presenter for that versus remote?

Unknown Speaker 37:00
Yeah, well, we what we typically have is we have both at our meetings will have some folks like, we have one gentleman who's in our user group from Portland, and he will, he'll present sometimes, and then we'll have folks that are in the room that are presenting. So it's a combination of both.

Daniel Garcia 37:17
Jack's I know a lot of ours, we do a lot of remote presenters. If we can have somebody local, then there, it's much more of an event feel if they're all there together and the excitement there, right. It's great idea. Try it and see. Yeah, worst case, you don't do it again.

Michaela Light 37:33
And the other benefit is you end up with a recording on your Facebook page that you can share out to people and encourage them see what they're missing.

Daniel Garcia 37:43
How many members typically show up on any given month,

Unknown Speaker 37:48
to our user group meetings around 10.

Unknown Speaker 37:52
user group that following ones are bigger, but

Daniel Garcia 37:55
you have six to 10, depending on the weather, the topic and things like that. And

Unknown Speaker 38:01
we're in the same boat around. Yeah, 1010 is probably a good average. The topic will greatly affect how many people show up?

Leon O'Daniel 38:10
Yeah, right.

Michaela Light 38:12
I mean, if you mentioned early the Adobe breakfast, if there's any tech events where you can get the user group name out and you know, make an announcement sort of be a quote, sponsor of the event, you're not paying anything. I know when we you know, Adobe or Macromedia did a big event in Washington, DC, they had 900 people attending, I got three minutes on the stage to talk about the user group. And that got a big bump in membership for us.

Daniel Garcia 38:41
We did something similar a few years back with one of the breakfast road shows in Chicago, and we worked with them and showed up and they let us kind of give a quick spiel on us. And it was nice, we got more people showing up to the event for them, we help promote it for them. So it's kind of a helping each other out.

Michaela Light 38:59
Also, you actually if you go to CF summit, or into the box or any other conference, you know, see if anyone else attending is from your city. or wear a T shirt that says you know Chicago user group or whichever your user appears. And you know, you'll get some back you'll pick up extra people just from that visibility.

Daniel Garcia 39:21
One thing I used to do when some of the conference's I'm excited me to cut you off. But I make postcards Elliot among some of the vendor tables saying hey, we're going to see fog. And if you're in the area come join or if you want to present, reach out. Some simple you could just leave behind and people can pick up.

Unknown Speaker 39:39
And that's the same thing that William Frank Houser did at the Seattle cold fusion breakfast, is he made up a bunch of Postcards just like you were talking about Daniel, and it really worked out well.

Michaela Light 39:50
It's easy to do with VISTA print or Kinko's. Get it? You know, it can be pretty simple. We didn't mention website, do you all have websites I feel user group was that important? Do you think or does not really matter.

Daniel Garcia 40:05
For us, it's undergoing a redesign for it's been undergoing redesign for a while, and kind of embarrassed by that. But it's important, we try to record as many of these presentations as we can. And then we list them up there as an archive. So people can come in and see the past recordings. And so for that part, it's pretty important plus general information about where you are and things like that. You also talked about the giveaways sometimes when you go to some of these conferences, where grabs extra swag, or whatever swag that will give some of that away at the sea bugs. So if somebody can't go to the conference, here's a cool, integral, squishy ball on fusion reactors, things like that.

Unknown Speaker 40:43
We have a website as well. RSS also grossly behind on getting the redesign finished, much like Daniels group's website, the relevant content for the current month's meeting is always updated. But the rest of it is not where I want it to be in a number of ways. That's one of the plans that my co manager and I have for later this year, hopefully. So as long as it's got the, whatever the current month's info is on it, I find that it does help. The couple of times that I have slacked on getting that updated. I have had a couple of attendees send me email saying what's the June meeting going to be the info isn't up there yet. And so I know people are checking it, at least periodically. We don't record meetings right now, that has been a thing we've talked about before, I've had about 5050 luck with the presenters being okay, with being recorded, some of them just don't want to be for different reasons. I know I've told Daniel before, when I spoken at his group to I don't want to be recorded for this one for you know, different logistical reasons or what have you. And that's fine. So we don't have an archive of the meetings in the past. Over the last two years or so our group has organically become more of a local community event. And so we've just started encouraging people show up in person, instead of looking for a link later and show up and meet fellow develop and asked questions in among the group, everyone here is nice and come check out hacker lab and see what kind of other classes they have. And so we've just kind of going in that direction a little bit more recently, and I haven't really talked to the manager about recording the sessions in quite some time, maybe I'll shoot him an email about that later just to see if he has any updated thoughts on it.

Daniel Garcia 42:20
And we only record the presentation portion. We don't record everything in the in the meeting.

Unknown Speaker 42:27
Right we find our website, pretty useful. users come out, and they will check out when's our next meeting how to get there, there is a bit of a protocol for attending a meeting at we work and we have that on there. We also post demos of some of the present the different things that we've done, you know, with the with code with tutorials, you know, and then, you know, step by steps, that's found that's been pretty useful. Then I mentioned this earlier, we have bios of our members that are active attendees that want to be on the website, not everybody wants to be on the website. You know,

Unknown Speaker 43:06
I think that the website is is very helpful.

Unknown Speaker 43:11
That's a great idea. But having regular

Unknown Speaker 43:15
group members have BIOS and things on the website, we have not done anything of the sort so far, and I'm going to absolutely suggest that to my co managers and

Michaela Light 43:23
particularly as a reward like someone was saying, for people who attend you know, or active, yeah, or who or have, you know, given us a talk members who gave but I also used to put, I used to take photos of the event and post those on the website. Or I see someone here has uses Instagram to promote stuff, I don't promote photos from the event. But I find that helps people imagine what it would be like to go if they've never been before. And people generally love seeing photos of themselves. So it's great way to get things shared. One of the other promotion things we didn't talk about is you know, Adobe has a forum, anyone can create an account and post on it, just put the announcement of the event there. And if you have a recording or photos, share them afterwards. You know, you might get people in your town who you know, you They didn't even know you existed. And you know, I think the same with the Lucy website, they have a blog, they if they have something relevant to them. I'm sure they'd be happy to put a blog post up or what about social media? Does anyone do any social media stuff? You have a Facebook page? or?

Unknown Speaker 44:40
Yeah, we have a Facebook page, a Twitter page. Between William and I, we try to get posts out there rather frequently about upcoming events or, like we had one of our members today just go through his 30 years 30 he retired after 30 years from the tech world fire departments, suburb, Seattle, you know, so little, little things about members or of interest to the group. But yeah, we're posting out on both of those quite heavily. We're starting to use Instagram to promote events, you know, and then just different will use that with it. We use Adobe Spark, when we repost to Instagram to do that kind of stuff.

Unknown Speaker 45:20
Pretty cool technology. Have you seen any noticeable? Like, what are your thoughts on doing Instagram? Have you had any?

Unknown Speaker 45:27
I just are. So So we've used that for my company, oh, Daniel designs, and it's worked great for that. We're just starting to use that for the user group. So I don't really have any good metrics on that at the moment. We're looking at just different ways to try to get in front of different audiences who might not have been exposed to our user group or cold fusion to get some interest like, Oh, well, I might be interested in this. So check it out.

Daniel Garcia 45:54
Yep. Um, one of the things that I struggle with, I've been doing this for eight years now seven, I get kind of burned out from time to time. And then these are all great ideas, but it's like, well, I gotta do it again. So I find that my level of go get as go getter ism, whatever, ebbs and flows sometimes. And so yeah, we do we have Facebook, we have Twitter. Yeah. So that is a challenge when

Unknown Speaker 46:19
you

Daniel Garcia 46:21
when you run one of these and having a strong co-manager,

Unknown Speaker 46:25
how you have to have that.

Daniel Garcia 46:27
Yeah, between that right now. And so it's all kind of me doing a lot of it. And but I'm

Unknown Speaker 46:32
something Yeah, I think I think

Michaela Light 46:34
co-manager awesome people in your company who can give their time to assist with, you know, posting photos, or videos, or whatever. So all you have to do is show up at the group. That's how I used to do my group. But I know everyone, not everyone can do that. But if you don't have a co manager, what can happen if someone gets sick or goes on vacation, the group kind of dies. And I've seen that happen a number of times in the past with us groups that was successful, and then the person got burnt out or whatever. So having one or more CO managers is a great thing to do, but not required to get the group started. A lot of these things we're talking about here are more advanced techniques. So they're good to do. So let's talk about the vision and member guidelines. I don't know if you have any of you have a group vision, or you have any guidelines for how members are supposed to behave, or you've ever had to get members out for being disruptive, or

Daniel Garcia 47:29
we've been pretty fortunate that we've never had to kick anyone out. Everyone's pretty professional. Nobody's never had a problem. person. So that's great. And we're pretty open anyone that's a local web professional enthusiasts, we just want them to come out and, and learn and interact.

Unknown Speaker 47:48
Yeah, we've been really fortunate as well as well. We haven't had people come in and, you know, be obnoxious or disrespectful or combative. We've had some times when conversations have gone on off the rails, and we'd have to kind of get people back focused in what the the on the topic is. But you know, and there's there's ways you can handle that. But yeah, we haven't really had the issue with people being combative, per se.

Unknown Speaker 48:16
We've had really good luck to no no problems in our, in our particular group knock on wood. I know there was one other c fuck that I spoke at a few times that used to have a problem attendee this was a number of years ago. And I don't remember what the proverbial last straw was. But yeah, they they just had told him like, you're not welcome back here anymore. But I've only heard of literally one person in the 10 or 11 years, I've been running user groups, and I've been speaking at different groups for about as long. So

Unknown Speaker 48:47
what would that person do? Say, good. What would that person do at these meetings?

Unknown Speaker 48:51
I'd rather not say on the recording, it was it was justified. And Tony's about able to come back though. Yeah, so it was bad enough, I fully support their decision.

Michaela Light 49:01
Alright, I haven't seen problems in person. But I did see problems when we had an email list that sometimes people would spam it or just, you know, turn into a flame war. So that's where our guidelines got started. But I think it's good to have things written down and have a short vision, what's the group for even if it's only a sentence or two, and maybe have some guidelines, there are some in my book, you're welcome to steal and edit, you know, the CFO life book that has a set of community guidelines.

Daniel Garcia 49:35
To go along with it.

With that, though, you should be prepared if the situation comes up, to have to address that. And one thing I would recommend is, don't be unilateral with decisions, try and get in consensus building from some of the other members. So that would just look like one person is dictating anything. It's really a community group. Like you're asking. Right? Exactly, yeah.

Michaela Light 50:00
Well, they say that the best leader leads from behind Brian, what songs do or someone said that you kind of gently encourage people in the right direction? So as we wrapping up here, you know, perhaps you can share why you're proud to use cold fusion?

Unknown Speaker 50:23
Daniel, is this where I finally have to tell you my favorite feature of the language?

Daniel Garcia 50:25
Yes, please.

Unknown Speaker 50:29
I'm Tyler. So I run a consulting business. We are a devout selfish. So we are a developer consultancy. Often clients will come to me and say, here's an app we'd like built, how do you think we should go about building it, and I try to be as objective as I can about what the problem is we need to solve and what is the most realistic technology stack for solving that problem. and nine times out of 10, I go with cold fusion, I just get things done more quickly, per line of code out of the box with CFL. I do most of the technology stacks. So it gets me productive quickly. And in the directions that I need to be productive. It covers all the different bases that I need, and it's good. And so to that extent, I liked it. It's Oh, driven, I think in object oriented terms, because of my background in video games and c++. So Daniel, I think my favorite feature is probably the CF component tech.

Daniel Garcia 51:26
Great, a lot of tech on a lot of what Nolan just said, I'm able to be very productive able to make, you know, create some complicated solutions and a non complicated way. Now granted, you know, 20 years ago, when I started doing some of this stuff, it wasn't the case, you just kind of learn as you went, but really with the level of modern changes. There's no reason why you can't build most anything in confusion. Very proud of a lot of things I built over the years and real applications making real money for the companies I work for. So it's very happy, I'm very passionate about cold fusion.

Unknown Speaker 52:03
I'm happy to use cold fusion I've been now this is year number 22 that I've been using cold fusion. And I like cold fusion, you know, and I use that as the my go to solution for most of my applications. Because it's integrated, tested, and it just works. My customers can come to me with, you know, some, you know, vision of what they want to get done. And I say, Yep, I can do that. Whether it be things like providing an interactive search for documentation, and we had a use case at Boeing, where we had disparate documentation, all different types of writing types want to be able to search it, cold fusion can do that, you know, we can just use CF index and CF search and see a selection and we're good, we need to build a dashboard, we have charting integrated, it's just right there, and it's available for you. And with other technologies, you're pulling in, you know, you know, components from my new get an artifact tree and all these others and trying to make them work. Cold Fusion just has it. It's all in one place. Integrated, tested and works. And that's why I love it.

Michaela Light 53:09
Yeah, I deco those things. I mean, it's very quick to code and, you know, much faster than coding in Java or adult net in my experience, or even PHP. Bible. You know, it's it's pretty thoroughly tested, I was talking to someone at Adobe said they had 40,000 test cases in their test suite to make sure cold fusion works good, which kind of blew me away. And, you know, runs fast, secure. And if you have to train someone up on it's very quick to learn it. So that was even a site called learn CF in a week, not Moran, which I think is fairly true. So great thing. So So I wrote a book about making cold fusion more alive. And I'm curious what you guys think what would make cold fusion more live this year.

Daniel Garcia 54:03
For me, it'd be more evangelism, I think you're doing a great job Michaela, and really trying to fire up the community. And I think a lot of us need to just keep going with you and keep posting out there and, and do some of these things, go to conferences, help user groups, post on Facebook just

Unknown Speaker 54:21
more.

Unknown Speaker 54:25
One of the things that I think would help to make CF more live this year, it would be something that it just not for this year, but ongoing is to see cold fusion curriculum, get put more into the middle schools and high schools and get people excited about what cold fusion can do, how they can go and build really cool stuff, and how easy it is to actually use it. You know, if you're able to go and get that in place, then you start building a talent pool to where larger companies are thinking, Okay, well, cold fusion isn't dead. And it is a technology that we should go and, you know, bring in or enhance within our company, which then that would feed excitement with the colleges to want to go and offer more curriculum, because they're going to want to provide people that are capable of filling jobs and companies that are offering cold cold fusion. So that's one of the things I wanted to see for a long time is more focus of getting people interested early on with this technology.

Michaela Light 55:35
You are muted, Nolan.

Unknown Speaker 55:37
Sorry. I agree with that. I'd also like to echo what Daniel said, and just get more of like what folks like yourself miquela are doing and promoted it more in general. I like that the we have fewer cold fusion conferences happening in 2019, then we did say two years ago, but the ones that are happening have had pretty noticeable change. I'm in attendance, which is good. So at the conference level, I think people are doing a lot of good work. I like that Adobe is working on rebuilding the cold fusion certification training, I think that will help show that it's, it is something that Adobe is investing in. And they are looking at getting people trained properly on modern versions of CFL and how to use it in 2019. Not just in 1998 style of coding. Just more of what things are doing, I always encourage people to go out to their local user groups. Even if you just sit in the back and watch and listen, if you're not big on asking questions, or you're not interested in giving a presentation of your own. Just being part of the people in the room and hearing the different things people are experiencing their day jobs and learning about new technologies like that can help. I like that, you know, the few people we have that are active on Twitter and LinkedIn posting about it, I think just more of the same. Well, we'll help.

Unknown Speaker 57:00
Yeah, I mean,

Michaela Light 57:02
I think the thing is that we shouldn't expect cold fusion to be made live by Adobe or Lucy or someone else from on high doing it. Each of the people in the cold fusion community needs to take some small action. And that small thing might just be tweeting about some cool feature used or sharing some snippet of code. Or maybe it's telling another developer Hey, this is a cool thing I did it doesn't have to be mega big. But if hundreds of thousands of CF has all did that, it would definitely shift things a lot. Just

Daniel Garcia 57:36
one other quick comment to if you want to make CF alive for yourself. Go check out artists and what they're doing with cold box and command box now the box stuff and there. It's very exciting. Some of the really cool things are doing if you want to see awesome cold fusion cone applications. Go check those guys out.

Michaela Light 57:53
Yeah, they had an amazing conference. I know no long you were there, into the box in Houston, Texas last month. And it was just chock full of it wasn't just box stuff, you know, box stuff is there open source or commercial products, but they had, you know, a lot of presentations, Bronco, cold fusion things. And they're really big about modernizing your cold fusion code. And that's something else, I think it's important that fusion can get a bad name is if if you're working on code or writing code that's, you know, 20 years old. There's a modern way to write cold fusion, so and modern tools to use that. Take it ahead of all the other languages out there, in my opinion, at this point.

Unknown Speaker 58:37
You've touched on an excellent point there. And Michaela another thing everyone can do to make quarters more alive is just attend one of the conferences, if you're on the fence, because you think it's expensive, or you don't want to take a couple of days of vacation time or whatever. Yes, it is a check, you sometimes have to cut out of your checking account. And that can be an irritant. I have a attended a bunch of conferences over the years, as part of my consulting business, I have never once come home from a cold fusion conference. And felt like that was a big waste of my time and money. Every conference I've gone to, I feel like I've gotten my money's worth I go, I learned a bunch of things, I meet people that are hitting the same pain points I'm hitting. I do a lot of great networking and get excited about what I'm doing for a living. I've always learned a few new things that I'm excited about taking back to my clients and back to my bosses and so on my teammates, and telling them check out what we can do. Now I didn't know about this feature. Did you see this new product that came out? Yeah, I always encourage people go to a conference. And I know sometimes they're the same. If they're hard to do that they're not all that hard to do. There are weekend events. fairly often there are conferences that are only on Fridays and Saturdays, you can get to them by taking a half day off work and just fly over and do it. I my hope is that the NC DEF CON conference will come back soon. That's a great conference. It's a Saturday and Sunday. You can fly out from the west coast. Ready, they're red eye flight back Miss no work at all. It's like a $200 ticket. There's all kinds of events in the area that are worth checking out. Even conferences that by name don't sound like they might match what you do for a living. Look at the session list and see if it's worth your time. There is a word camp conference here in Sacramento later this summer. by the name you would think oh, it's all WordPress stuff. I went last year it was 30 bucks, three zero for two days worth of sessions. And I learned so much about search engine optimization about code linking about new static site generator tools and things like Gatsby js, it was well worth the time and money. I think I've sat in maybe two WordPress sessions in the whole today. So find a conference somewhere that fits your time in your budget and check it out. It's a big way to make CF for live and to make your own career more alive to

Daniel Garcia 1:00:47
you and go along with that too. I know Adobe has done developer weeks, an artist has also done developer weeks where they're really little mini and online conferences. We can go into tons of sessions and interact with us speakers, and definitely encourage you to participate in those things as well.

Michaela Light 1:01:05
So my talking about conferences, what are you looking forward to the next conference, you're going to whether that CF summit or some other one.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:17
So I'm looking forward to going to CF summit this fall. didn't attend last year, we had things going on. But a couple things that I look forward to when I attend CF summit is catching up with with folks that I've met, I started going to CF summit back in 2014. What I particularly liked in the 2017. One was the sessions that were on supporting technologies for cold fusion. So I'm really looking forward to some of those.

Daniel Garcia 1:01:53
I'm not going to be able to make summit this year I have gone before and some CF objectives and things like that. And same thing you get some of that working, but also you get access to Adobe people were Hey, I'm having this problem. And I'm not finding the answer online. And can I ask you about it. And hey, we actually had calls with Adobe engineers after the fact that to talk us through some things and even gotten hot fixes out of it. So there's a huge benefit interacting with them there.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:21
I love going to summit I'm I'm I'm looking forward to the plans Adobe has this year, especially around redoing the whole piece and certification. Full disclaimer, I'm actually working with Adobe on some of that, I'm looking forward to seeing them launch these things and help people get certified in cold fusion again, I also like it at the keynote events when you look around and you can see 500 or so cold fusion developers sitting in a giant conference room in Vegas. And that is always a great photo up for me to just take a nice panoramic shot and throw it on Twitter and show people if cold fusion is dead? How did 500 of these people show up in Vegas for an event? And it does it gets me excited to see that many people that are taking time out of their their schedules and attending such a conference like that.

Michaela Light 1:03:10
Yeah, I mean, these are all great reasons. I'm planning on launching a new Cold Fusion book at CF summit. It's called fusion for CIOs, why they should either buy it or continue using it or come back to it if they moved away. So I am very excited about that. And the chance to talk with people about that topic, because I think a lot of the ways to keep confusion alive is to get the top leadership in a company to be behind it. So anyway, I think it's time to wrap up, but people may want to find you online. So how can people best find you and your user group? Let's go start with Leon and then go to Nolan and Daniel.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:56
So you can find the Seattle cold fusion user group online on web at Seattle see fog.org. You can also find us on Facebook at CL cold fusion user group. On Twitter, we're at CL c fog. So we're pretty easy to find. We're also out there on on meetup.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:20
You can find me and my business at south of Shasta com. We're also on Twitter at South Shasta. And on Facebook. You can find my user group second or active at sec interactive com. We're also on Twitter at Sac interactive. And we're also on Facebook.

Daniel Garcia 1:04:38
You can find us online cc fog.org cC fog.org. And once you're there, if you go to our contact page, we've got links to our Facebook or Google group, things like that. Also our meetup. com. So come on out, say hello.

Michaela Light 1:04:54
Right. Well, thanks everyone for being part of this user group panel. Lots of great insight and ideas. If anyone listening has any comments, please put the and if you're interested in starting us group particularly interested in hearing about that. always happy to help people in that regard. So thanks, everyone for being here.

Daniel Garcia 1:05:18
Thank you Michaela. Thanks for having us. Thanks.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai