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Michaela: Welcome back to the show. And today, we're gonna be looking at what you may have missed in C.F. 10, 11, and 2016 with Charlie Arehart. And if you don't know Charlie which I find hard to believe because everyone knows Charlie in the C.F. world. He is a veteran ColdFusion trouble shooter. He's been doing it since like the first version came out and he's been an I.T. wizard for like more than three decades now I think. But right now, he helps out people with their ColdFusion servers.
So when they're sick or not doing what they should be doing. And what we’ll look at today is something you may not have considered. There may be bunch of features in older versions of ColdFusion that are still in the version of ColdFusion used today that you don't even know about. So we’ll talk about that. And we'll also talk about C.F. Summit East where Charlie will be speaking. And if we had a chance, we'll reminisce about some of the other conferences in Washington D.C. So welcome Charlie.
Charlie: Hey there! Thanks for doing this as always. It's great that you do that for the community.
Michaela: You’re so welcome. So isn't ColdFusion 10 gone end of life? Why would anyone care what features were in C.F. 10?
Charlie: Sure, sure, so you know and that's reasonable question. The point of the presentation is that as I've been helping people over the past several years ten years, 20 years now. And I'm sure you can attest to this yourself that people don't migrate up as quickly as the new releases come out. So there are people that today are still running on C.F. 9 or, and here's the bigger point. They say, “Well I'm on nine anymore. I've moved up to 11 or 2016.” Well often they will have skipped let's say ten. And so ten was such a watershed release compared to nine or earlier ten and later are quite different because nine on earlier ran on JRun and ten and later on Tomcat. So I just use that as a marking point to say for anybody that maybe jumped from nine or earlier to ten or later, these are things to be aware of.
And so of course things that were true in ten are by and large still true in 11 and so far into 2016. So it was just to say, “Hey you might have skipped one of these or you might have been on it. But you were in maintenance mode only and you were focused just on what you needed to get working.” Because maybe you used to be on nine and when life support for ten was still available, you knew that you needed to get up to a supported version. But maybe didn't do anything with it. You just ran your code on ten. And then the same thing of course can be true with somebody now only maybe moving to 11. I've got plenty of customers who are still on ten, still on 11, some still on nine, even earlier and they come for help sometimes.
And so even though it's not supported always make it really clear you don't want to be on an unsupported version for security reasons and bug fixes and things like that. Still people do. And so the whole point of the talk is to say well here's the things that were new and different and maybe troublesome in ten and then what was new and different and maybe troublesome; compatibility issues perhaps in 11 and then in 2016. And so it's not just what are the features, but it's what are the hidden gems as I like to do in all my talks. But it's not the hidden gems talk as I talk about the major new features and I talk a little bit about some of the hidden gems.
But I also talk about compatibility issues because maybe again if you're moving up to say 2016 from ten maybe you didn't pay attention to what was in 11 and maybe there were compatibility issues that came out in 11 and you didn't experience them because you just jumped from ten to 2016. So the talk is gonna go over each one: ten and then 11 and then 2016. And in those; each one, I'll talk about what were the major features, what are the minor features, what are some key changes that you should be aware of for things like security and performance and language differences and then especially what's compatibility issues.
Things to be aware of that might cause your code to fail and it might just be a minor issue to be aware of or (and this is important) sometimes, people are reading about the releases and they're under the impression from what they read that there are some big deal nasty problems that makes them not wanna go to one or the other, skip one or the other. And often, those issues have been resolved. They've been resolved by updates, bug fixes, new connectors, or just lessons learned. And so I share a lot of that stuff to also motivate people to give it a try even if they're under the impression that it's not gonna work because maybe the thing they're reading as a blog post from a few years ago or a couple years ago and maybe even recently from somebody who's just misinformed.
And maybe they wrote their experience and they never got around to doing the updates that would have fixed the problem or they're stuck on 11 and maybe the problem was fixed in 2016. So again, these are all just the kind of things I like to help people think through. Even things like licensing issues and the specific updates. What kind of changes got brought up in a particular update? And things like that. So it's fun. I enjoy doing the talk. I've given it at Summit last year and C.F. Objective last year. Several presentations several times. So I've enjoyed doing it. People keep having it selected to be a talk. But I think they agree and understand that there's different audiences that will benefit from the different parts of what I talk about. Maybe some people won't care about the ten part. Okay that's like 15 minutes of the talk.
Michaela: Well most of those new features that were in C.F. 10 are still in 11, 2016 and I assume will still be in 2018.
Charlie: That's why [crosstalk] [06:53]. It’s my point is that even though you may have skipped one, the features that were introduced are probably gonna be in 18 comes out. They're not gonna focus.
Michaela: So you mentioned security issues because C.F. 9 and 10 are end of life. And I know from that State of the C.F. [inaudible] we did, there’s still plenty of people running old versions. And just like you were saying, this is a really bad idea to still run an old version of ColdFusion. It [inaudible] you could easily be hacked and not know it was have been running on versions so.
Charlie: Well I have to say that unfortunately, you're breaking up a little bit. So I don't hear the complete question. But I gathered you were saying you know, you understand the concern of running old versions and maybe you asked to I see people still running old versions. It sounded like a question. And I'll say that yeah, I often see that and it's a shame and sometimes it's because people just don't understand. They just regard the C.F. server or their database server or whatever they're running. They just think well I’ll just install it and it's ready to go, right. And you know that's not the case unfortunately. Even if you downloaded C.F. 2016 today, it would not be fully updated. It’s on you to update it.
Now the good news is that in ten and above, they do now have this automated update mechanism that will (unless you tell it not to) it will tell you when there's updates. And for the most part, you just click a button and update it and it's easy. But there's people that have been using C.F. for a long time and they got burned back in the nine and eight days and they had trouble with updates, so they didn't wanna do it. And then you maybe know that sometimes the issues aren't with ColdFusion. Sometimes the issues are about Tomcat. So ColdFusion updates maybe one in ten updates include, maybe now that maybe two and ten, maybe more include updates to Tomcat. So you wanna get those updates not just for updating ColdFusion, but upping Tomcat.
And then you may know that the JVM that underlies ColdFusion, that needs to be updated. And it's rare that an update of C.F. updates the JVM. New releases, new installers even do. So this is something interesting. Some people don't know and I would cover it. C.F. 2016, if you got the installer today, it would be the latest available installer. And if you happen to be for Windows 64, bit that installer came out in about February of last year; 2017. And it was new because it added support for Windows 2016, but you could also have an installer that was from December 2016.
And that was a new update that came out with that included a bunch of bug fixes, and connector updates, and a new JVM. But there are some people that today I see, I help them. They're installing with a C.F. 2016 installer that's actually the original one that came out in February of 2016. And that has no updates and it has no JVM you know for the time old.
So I'm just making the point that even today when one downloads you have 2016, it needs to be updated because it's like on update three inlays that they've five. But more important, I wanna caution people when you are about to run the installer, you know go make sure you get the latest one. At least it'll be that much more updated then perhaps one that you got from somewhere or you've been bringing forward from one machine to another. So these are little things that do cover. But more than now to talk about you know the feature differences, and what's changed, and what's different, and what's new, and why you wanna take advantage of them; and things like that.
Michaela: Now hopefully, some of the people listening are thinking about upgrading to ColdFusion 2018 which is coming out real soon now. Though we don't know the exact date. So why should be C.F.ers care about these old features?
Charlie: Well you made the point earlier that even if one jumps to C.F. 2018. Let's say from C.F. 11. The things that were new in 2016, you then you didn't pay attention to, they're gonna be in 2018. And I'll say it again, the things that were new in C.F. 11 you maybe didn't really fully take advantage of. I mean again you know I've been doing this for 20 plus years. You know that there's people who don't take full advantage of things that C.F. can do and every release adds new things. And some of them are language features, and some of them are productivity features, and some of them are security features, and so you want to be aware of these things. Even if you are on the latest version, you sometimes will be surprised to find out oh, I did know that ten added that feature or 11 added that feature.
And you may not go back and review the documentation. You know that’s a thing where I come from is that a lot of people they… somebody installs the whatever. Let's say it's C.F. 2018. You know some day this year, C.F. 2018 will come out. It's called C.F. 2018. When it comes out, someone's gonna install it. And the people that do their development and run their applications you know they might never even look at the docs or C.F. 2018. And I'm just saying they probably didn't look at the docs for C.F. 2016 and then for 11 and maybe even for ten. And so they're just not paying attention to what's new. All they care about is does my stuff run? Or if we add our new functionality, does that new functionality work? But often, they're not paying attention to what's new and different.
And so I'm here to just carry the flag and say there's lots of new stuff in every release; dozens, dozens, literally dozens. Several dozen things. There were new in ten. Several dozen things that were new in 11, and a few dozen things that were new in 2018. And there's gonna be another few dozen things at least new in 2018. So it always pays to be aware and it's an hour of your time and just come in and I really feel that everybody that comes into the session will learn something. Something maybe oh my gosh, I did know it did that. I've been waiting that forever and I never knew it was added and other things will be out. That's what we needed. We've got to do that functionality I'm glad to know C.F. does that now. So just lots of cool stuff.
Michaela: So it sounds like if someone was going from C.F. 9 or 10 that they easily could be close to 100 new features or fixes available.
Charlie: And I wanna say features not fixes. There's a few hundred fixes. And that's why I stress again sometimes, when people say, “Oh! I don't wanna go there wherever there is. I don’t wanna go there because I've heard that that's bad and if people had trouble.” I mean just recently on the C.F. forums, somebody who's been in C.F. for a long time. He said, “I'm not moving the C.F. 2016. I've seen too many people complaining about trouble with it.” And I thought really, C.F. 2016? And I decided to put together a new form thread and I posted it there saying, “Hey everybody, you tell me. Do you have showstopper problems that are keeping you from going to C.F. 2016 and are you aware of some issues that are affecting the majority of people that would wanna go”.
Because I'm saying, “I don't know of anything that would keep the majority of people who'd wanna go from being on the go.” Now does that mean there aren't some issues? Sure, there's some issues where somebody or some small segment of people have some quirky thing that doesn't work for them and there may be a bug that they've reported. And we should point out for folks who don't know there is tracker that adobe dot com. That's the bug reporting mechanism for the past couple years. And maybe there's something there that somebody will say, “Yeah that's our bug. That's keeping us from going there”. Well fair enough, I'm not saying there's no bugs. But I'm saying, “I'm not aware of there being showstopper issues that you keep somebody from going up.”
But my point were you know that affect a majority of people. I wanna stress that point. But sure, there may be somebody who has not moved to it because they heard there was a problem and it may be that problem is no longer true. It might have been fixed by an update. It might have been a temporary problem that it was fixed by an installer. I mean I'll repeat again, the original installer, what it lays down is different than the later installer of later 2016. And I've seen some differences that were down to some underlying X.M.L. files that were different in the one installer versus the other. Now I don't wanna get in the weeds on that stuff and I'm not saying that's the kind of thing that should keep somebody to be panicked about which one they use.
But it just stresses the point that these are important differences and then we're just talking about 2016. Then there's 11 and all of its variants with different couple different installers over the years and a couple in 2015 updates to 11 and there was 23 or 24 updates ten. Anyway, I’ll cover all that in more detail and I point out what's distinctive and interesting about the key updates that were added. So again, I don't want anybody to feel overwhelmed by this stuff. Bottom line is you could move up to it and the longer your stuff works, you wouldn't pay attention too and that's kind of where I think most people are is they don't pay attention and they just wanna know their stuff works. I think you'll find that by and large it will work.
And if it doesn't, there are some issues to be aware of and there are some workarounds to get around them or some things to be aware of. There are some compatibility issues. They may not hit you. There are plenty of people who have no problem moving from 2016 or no problem moving to 11. But let me just say this because this is where people do get that sometimes they'll move from nine to 2016, or nine to 11. Well you're crossing the bridge of nine to ten. And the bridge of nine to ten is a bridge of some sorrows because there's a big difference between nine and earlier and ten and later. So I just wanna stress that point again that that big change in ten to running on Tomcat.
There's differences in how files… you know where the files are and what the folder structure is. There is difference in how some underlying configuration things get done and some old things that used to do in nine and earlier. Maybe to turn on JRun metrics. They don't work anymore. There's a new metric feature built into C.F. ten. So sometimes, you'll read some things then do some things that maybe will be quite different when you go from nine to whatever's new. But I'm just stressing that that difference isn't like… Like I've had people that guy I think was probably really saying that he's had problems moving to 2016 or heard people were.
This maybe were people that were jumping from nine to 2016 or heck they were getting 2016 an eleven and ten and all the new differences and issues. And they just need to be aware there's much, much more to a given release than just that latest release. If you skip some, there's gonna be issues related to the releases that you're skipping. So get the whole talk. It's only gonna take 45 minutes to an hour. We're gonna cover all this ground in that talk. We don't wanna… you know I do wanna scare people away and we don’t wanna do the whole talk here obviously. So we're about 20 minutes in. So anything else.
Michaela: So yeah sure. I know you've presented this talk to hundreds of C.F.ers over the last year or so. And I'm kind of curious, what was the feature that most surprised people that they didn't know about?
Charlie: Well there hasn't… you know there isn't too much opportunity for that kind of feedback. So I can't know for sure what people would say was I kind of wish you'd asked me that earlier to think about it. Because I know there are things that people in you know generally intrigued to learn about. I guess I'll say this and that's why you really just want to come and see the talk. Is that there are language features that are gonna excite people that do other languages. And have lamented that they had to do things in a C.F. way and they wish they could do it the way they did in other languages in things in ten and 11 and 2016 that address that. Things like the ability to use was it colons to separate property is the…
There was an operator, there was the other operator. I forget off the top of my head. But it's like the oldest operator. It's like a coalescing no feature. Anyway I'll cover that. But I'm just saying there are language features that are different that some people will go, “Oh that's gonna make my life easier. But I can use that as I was used to using that from whatever language they're coming from. And then some people already know this, but it's worth highlighting that C.F. 11 fully implemented on a percent script capability. You don't have to use a single tag anymore if you don't want to.
Some know that in ten and nine and eight there were various fits and starts towards adding more tag script like implementations of tags and some of those approaches were kind of wonky and those didn't continue. What was done in eleven was a whole new kind of way of doing it and every tag… may be except for a couple of things. But for the most part every tag, you can do any tag in script. And there's a nomenclature for converting what we're tag after to some values into arguments and values for a given function for the most part or other ways of doing it. But anyway, we won't go into that right now. But that's an example of something where somebody who wished for full script support. It's there in 11.
Michaela: Yeah that’s great! So what about cloud deployments? I know a lot of people these days are looking at deploying either through Docker or some other cloud deployment strategy. There any of the changes address that or?
Charlie: Well I wouldn't… I don't think there's any that I would say that were specifically related to that. I would say… I mentioned in passing earlier that we’ll cover licensing changes and there's always in every release there's licensing tweaks and everybody should look at the EULA; E U L A and user licensing agreement and for which everyone you're on. So if you're going to 2016, look at the EULA for 2016. And if there's something you don't like about it, look at the EULA for 11 and you might go, “Hah, we're gonna stay on 11 because we like that EULA and the way it deals with this issue or that issue.” And sometimes, it's about D.M. Sometimes, it's about cloud deployment. Sometimes, it's about number of cores.
And I'd highlight some of those key differences in the talk about what was different in ten, what was in 11, and what was in 2016. But as far as functionality and features no, there's nothing I can really think of. I mean some folks know that S3 support was added. I think I was back in eight maybe nine; might have been nine, but anyway so that's not new in those. And then you mentioned Docker and some people know that Adobe has said that C.F. 2018, they're intending to offer Docker support you know, Docker implementation of ColdFusion. So we'll see about that. That remains to be seen.
So yeah, I can't think that there's much else that would be particular [inaudible] [22:56]. But I will say that when I was starting to list some of the features, I was just [inaudible] that there are things that will interest developers. I'll say that there's also things that will interest administrators and there’s a whole bunch of features that are of particular interest to administrators. So for instance again, I mentioned the C. F. 10 added the automatic update mechanism. And when that works, it works great all throughout two that sometimes it doesn't work. And for those who maybe have tried to do an update of ten or 11 or 2016 and tripped over it found they didn’t work, or the admin didn't come up or ColdFusion didn't start or some code was broken.
Sometimes, it’s the update does not work even though it may look like it works. Sometimes, if you look in the underlying log files for the update, you find that it doesn't work. So I have a whole blog post on that. I talk about it and point to it in the presentation probably save it if you ever having trouble after applying an update. Don't feel like you have to uninstalling and reinstall ColdFusion. It's just a problem with the update and my blog post talks about it. If you just Google ColdFusion 10 update help. So I talk… it came out back in like 2013 and it was in the context of the things that were different or maybe it was in 2016. I can’t remember. But I said with regard to the update mechanism that new in ColdFusion ten and above.
So yeah, check that out. So there's new administrator features, new developer features, new security features, new features and all kinds of different areas that will appeal to different people. And that's what I was really trying to say earlier to your question was different people will find things more appealing. Some people wouldn’t care about the added stuff at all, some people wouldn’t care about the language stuff at all. So everybody's gonna find something appealing. And I probably do list hundred new things in the course of the presentation. And of course, I don't time to go over every one of them.
But I try to organize them and categorize them and say these are ones that might interest you. And I list them and highlight them; ones that might give particular interest. In that point your resources for learning more whether it's my hidden gems talks. Every release I do a hidden gems talk and I get into more detail in those obviously [inaudible] [25:07] whole release. And then I also point to Adobe's docs. And I just wanna say this too. I like to always make the point that there's more to the ColdFusion documentation than just the C.F.M.L. reference.
If you Google stuff and all you find is what's called the C.F.M.L. reference, that's not the way to learn ColdFusion any more than looking at a dictionary is not the way to learn English. You need to be shown how to use the language. And the same thing is true with ColdFusion. So there's the Developer's Guide. Many people know it. It's over 3,000 pages in P.D.F. If you could get a P.D.F. of it 3,000 pages. And there's often 30 pages on how to do X.
And so if you're trying to learn how to use a feature, don't look at the reference look at the Developer's Guide. It's called ‘Developing ColdFusion Applications’. If you Google that, you'll find it. So anyway I point to the key resources because often in that guide or sometimes in their reference and sometimes even in the configuring administrator, they might talk about have a page or a section that says what's new in the release. And they may have a paragraph or two on each new feature and you should definitely check those out. So you get all points of them in my talk for sure.
Michaela: Fabulous! So I know he spoke at C.F. Summit East or as it was called the C.F. [inaudible] [26:34] I think. But they remain in the D.C. or East Coast area who wants a lot of cool C.F. I'm glad they did and I think there are ten speakers total, two tracks. And you can't beat the price of this event. It's zero dollars so. And it includes breakfast and lunch.
Charlie: yeah
Michaela: So very generous of Adobe to do that.
Charlie: Yes, so anybody is in the D.C. area or anywhere nearby be worth driving even a couple of hours to get there. It's gonna be a great event. Several speakers, two tracks you know it's from Adobe. And I wanna also highlight that you wanna see the Adobe keynote because we’ll not only talk about what's new in 2016, but if they follow the pattern of the past couple of events I've seen them at. The keynote talks about some very compelling things about the present and future of ColdFusion. Some of the things I'm hinting at, but more that I won't get into.
For instance sales optic and sales of licenses a ColdFusion of not just for upgrades and support agreement license, but really literally selling. They highlight how sales to new customers that are never had ColdFusion before have been going up for years. And they show those numbers and they show the trend with the graphs. And we talked about security earlier and I'll say it again, I'm not trying to steal the thunder, but I just first those who maybe won't go to something else you'll hear them make a great point which is that there haven't been any zero days for ColdFusion. I think it's been like three or four years because Adobe…
Michaela: wow!
Charlie: [Crosstalk] [28:17] security seriously and so many people just want to do things and parrot what they've heard three years. And sometimes, you're hearing stuff that has been said for three or four or five years and no one's challenged them. But yeah, I mean there's been no zero days in ColdFusion and Adobe takes security very seriously and has like set up created C.F., and upgraded Tomcat, and upgraded Java, and added security features that, and then added new secure profile and ten we'll talk weekly about that and they evolve how it works in eleven and some ways in 2016 even.
So yeah, I'm very encouraged and you like to always ask a question at the end about the vitality of C.F. and I'll just say that. If you look at things objectively there's lots of good things going on and you could be misled and led down a sad path by people who wanna just plain was nothing but bad news and I don't see it. I hope people every day and all week probably about a ten clients a week and I help make problems go away.
And sometimes, the problems are ones that they thought were daunting or were gonna make them have to leave C.F. or leave whatever version they were on or go back to the old version. And that could leave you feeling like things are very bad. But I love helping solve these problems and it often doesn't take very long. And so the good news is that I've left a trail of very happy people that have stayed with C.F. and not had to move or not had to go to a new cluster of implementation [shuffling] [29:54] couldn't scale or whatever.
And of course, you wanna go to cluster implication are great value to that and I can help people do that as well. Understand I've had people the thought C.F. was the problem and that they had to go to very expensive boxes with huge amounts of RAM and much C.P.U. And we found out what the problem was like oh well you know. So maybe you can forestall that major purchase or you can spread it out over a couple machines and increase reliability and not worry so much about concerns over scalability. But again, I don't wanna go too far down the road to discuss something like that. I know you've got some other people. In fact, Mike Collins was… you said you’ve had interview with him, right? Was his on…
Michaela: Yeah, I talked to him a few weeks ago.
Charlie: It was that on a performance?
Michaela: yeah
Charlie: Kind of focus?
Michaela: Yeah, he was talking about ColdFusion performance and so…
Charlie: So people… Have got that [inaudible] [30:56]?
Michaela: I think it comes out next week. So we’ll put the link in the show notes for this episode. We talked all about scaling ColdFusion and I'll put away all the other things you mentioned in the show notes on the TeraTech site Podcast page for this episode. So yeah, looks like a great line up of speakers and it's really convenient location near a Metro in what? Downtown Washington D.C. I think is only two blocks away from where it was last year. This year is the Renaissance Hotel and so…
Charlie: It's lovely you know perfect time to be coming and seeing maybe the cherry blossoms sometimes they will have frozen off by then; probably by late April they'll probably be gone, but you never know and it's a lovely time for D.C. Lots of tourists come and so you can expect a lot of vitality, restaurants, lots of people, bars, lots of people, beach crowded with lots of people.
It's really amazing to look back on how this is changed over the years. I mean even when you and I were doing the… You know with Maryland and various events in the D.C. area 20 years ago, D.C. was very different. And if you haven't been back in a long time, you're gonna find D.C. is a very vibrant. There’s lots of excitement in the downtown, there's restaurants, all kinds of stores and restaurants which had been you know 50 years ago and 60 years ago. It kind of fell on hard times in the 70s and 80s. It's really come back or in the few thousand.
Michaela: Yeah no, it's really, really improved. I remember how it was in the 80s. It was… interesting. Let me call it that so…
Charlie: [Crosstalk] [32:42] and it was just horrible continuous just like five blocks from where we're gonna be. It was so bad. It was broken bottles and trash in the streets and buildings burned out and it's just very, very different since the 60s and 70s and 80s. So glad to see, sorry. We had a little bit of a lag, so I stepped on you. I'm sorry so go ahead.
Michaela: Yeah now it's all… No, no worries that… So now it's all fancy shops, and bars, and condos…
Charlie: And people that's the thing. I mean it used to be… I wanted to college as well at G.W. which was in D.C. and this was like 80… no early 80s. And then the streets rolled up after like 6:00 everybody was gone and there was not much else except going to nightclubs, weird places through highs not seemingly nightclubs. And then now, it's just all busy all the time, that's great. So people really… if you're at all hesitating about going you know a great time with culture with the museums and monuments they're all within walking distance of where we’ll be. So it should be a great time.
Michaela: Yeah and it's happening on Wednesday, the 25th of April from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. So and we'll put the website for it. It's on the [inaudible] [34:15] website, but we’ll give the exact U.R.L. to in the show notes.
Charlie: Sure [inaudible] [34:22] ColdFusion.com. Currently, it's the current blog post that's been there for about a month or two is the announcement of the event as well; blogs.coldfusion.com.
Michaela: Yeah, well that's… I’ll link that in too if people wanna refer to it with the exact U.R.L. Just in case they post something else on that blog because you never know. So yes, but good memories of ColdFusion conferences in D.C. I remember going to the… there was no layer conference I think.
Charlie: Yeah, layer.com in 99.
Michaela: yeah
Charlie: Maybe 2000, yeah.
Michaela: I think it was 99. It might be in 2000. You might be right.
Charlie: We're still there Defcon was in 99 and it was I think in Boston and then the second 2000 and that was in a hotel; Telegraphed the Rock Creek Park. Where I had my high school prom in fact. I can't remember the name of the… But it's none of those old classic hotels. It was there. But anyway, that was a great event and I just had somebody the other day send their a comment on Facebook or something recalling that. It was fun time; absolutely
Charlie: And then…
Michaela: yeah
Charlie: This year is the anniversary. The 20th anniversary of the first national C.F. conference. It wasn't the Layer Defcon as some trivia for you. Used to love to do trivia nights and you're a games of the various conference you ran. But the first national C.F. conference was not the Defcon it was instead the… I guess we just called it the ColdFusion Developer Conference and it was run by Roby, Sean, and a couple other folks helped organize it and it was out in Fort Collins Colorado.
And I got to be a speaker there and Jeremy Alair was [inaudible] [36:14] dozen speakers. It was a great event. And then round that same time you were running the Maryland sea fog and started doing the C.F. events at the NIHC Fun and what became C.F. United and that was great times too. Thanks for your involvement in getting those things going back then.
Michaela: Sure, we had good times. Did 11 years of that conference. So maybe the spirit of it lives on in the C.F. Alive Podcast. So if folks want to find you online, what are the best ways to do that Charlie?
Charlie: Well I mean of course my website care.hart.org is the best place. And if you just Google my name. If you didn’t misspell it, you’ll probably find it. But it is… but I'm also at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, Skype, and everything else that just carehart; C A R E H A R T, Carehart 36:14.
Michaela: Fabulous! So it's great having you on the show telling us all about ColdFusion and I hope your talk goes really well at C.F. Summit East. Anything else you wanna share today before we go?
Charlie: No, I don't think so. Just [inaudible] [37:40] from my log cabin. This is where I work. I’m really blessed to be able to work from a log cabin in your old you know by myself just a one room cabin, very comfortable, nice mini split providing heating here throughout the year and the outside is just woods and farmland. And I hear cows in the distance and critters running through the woods and I mean anything else. It's wonderful, it's very quiet, so wonderful place to work. And I know… we can't hear, you must have shut your doors. But we can usually hear in your background. Late that day. But we could hear birds, song birds, and other wind blowing and you’re down there. You’re in the Coast [inaudible]? No, where was it again, Peru?
Michaela: I'm in Peru right now. I travel around. I spend about six months in Peru and I spend a couple of months in Thailand and Europe and the states. So that’s my current whatever. So wherever my lap top is, that’s where my office is. I just love traveling. I've got a goal to visit every country in the world. I think I've got about 54 off the list. That's 193 or… People argue about how many countries there are so. And of course they're always going away or creating new countries.
Charlie: [Crosstalk] about that. Well I just… the other day it was my wife's birthday and one of the gifts I got her because she enjoys you know we enjoy traveling too and she loves to keep track of where we've been and had always talked about getting a map with pushpins in it. And you may know these available maps that are… that have a scratch off there kind of that same material is on a scratch off ticket.
And so you know if you come with a little scraper and you can scrape off the countries you've been to. So as you visit countries, the map starts to go from being gold colored over top of everything to multi-colored and the colors of the flags at the bottom. It's a neat idea. You might wanna check that out if you're gonna… if you wanna keep track of them 57 that you've been to, you'll be busy.
Michaela: Yeah, I think there are some… I use an online app, but I don't remember the name of it. But you kind of check off the country and it does the same thing. So that's a great suggestion. Well great talking to you Charlie and thanks for coming on the show today.
Charlie: Again thanks for all you’re doing and keeping C.F. alive.