Ray Camden’s wife Jeanne who died suddenly on May 23rd, 2018. Ray has been known in the ColdFusion world as cfjedimaster for many years.
I felt sad reading this devastating news. Losing a life partner is hard. It sucks, actually. I lost my life partner, Liz, in 1993 from cancer. I was depressed for at least 9 months afterwards. Just going through the motions of going to work, eating, watching TV and sleeping. It took me years to process it fully.
Adobe ColdFusion community cfjedimaster
Ray has been very active in the CF community over the last 20 years that I have known him:
- Blogging at https://www.raymondcamden.com/
- Speaking at dozens of ColdFusion conferences
- Appearing on CF podcasts including the CF Alive podcast
- Contributing to many ColdFusion open source projects
- And helping out other CFers in forums and in person.
While Ray is using other technologies in his main job these days, he continued to speak at CF conferences and do CF side work.
The last time we’ve met was at Into The Box 2017 in Houston TX
(photo of me and Ray at ITB)
He was a top rated speaker at CFUnited for all 11 years it ran.
Help Ray Fundraiser
With Jeanne gone he no longer will be traveling for work to conferences. He will be staying at home in Lafayette, LA with his 7 children
(Photo of Ray, Jeanne and 6 of their children)
I am amazed at how much energy he has for programming (and his hobby obsession Star Wars :-). It was so nice to see that the community felt that it was time to give some of that energy back to him. Long time CFer and speaker Todd Sharp set up a fundraiser to help Ray and his family. Already over $45k has been raised by 425 people.
I am sending light and love to Ray and his family. I hope to see him again in CF podcasts and maybe one day back at conferences.
You have so many friends Ray, and we all feel for you and your family.
And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.
What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.
And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.
You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.
All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.
Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.
No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next
ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist
Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.
√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production
√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading
√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF
√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!
Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.
- 073 Progressive Web Apps (A Gentle Intro for CFers who are scared of PWAs) with Ray Camden
- SCRIPT VAN WINKLE, Episode 4: Getting Real, Open Source, and Raymond Camden
- TPDP Episode #3: Developer Tools that can Make You More Productive Towards Your Next Release
- 025 Why Programming in Node is so Powerful (how CFers can learn), with Ray Camden
- 003 Kick Your Server to the Curb and Go Serverless with Raymond Camden
