State of CF Union Survey 2017 pt.2, with Brad Wood

Contents

Filling out CF surveys
Here's what you will find in the part 2 of this analysis:
You can download a 72-page state of the CF Union 2017 report here

Welcome back to the part 2 of the State of the ColdFusion Union 2017 Survey analysis.

In case you missed it, follow this link to read the State of The CF Union 2017 Analysis part 1.

Filling out CF surveys

Usually, there are more respondents once the results are out.

When we put out, we say, “Okay, this is the final survey results,” another flurry of people say, “Oh yeah, I forgot to do it,” and they come in and fill it out.

Even though it's a relatively small sample of the population, State of the CF Union survey is the largest out of the ColdFusion surveys, so probably one does get the best sampling, from the survey.

And it's a free survey. We tell as many people as we can about it and if anyone . There were a few comments from people saying, “How can we get ‘regular ColdFusion programmer starts the survey'?”

They're not part of the social spheres, and it's very difficult to get things in front of them. It can be frustrating sometimes. There's people that do show up sometimes at conferences and you ask them about a certain technology and if they're using it. It might be three or four years old, and their response is, “I've never heard of that.” That's one of the frustrating parts, this other area of opportunity is increasing the engagement of the CF community out there so people are more familiar with what's going on.

CFML Slack has been a fantastic platform.

Brad’s example:

‘’Recently, somebody asked on CFML Slack about a querying language for ColdFusion, and I happened to see it and so I gave them a link to a query builder project that Eric Peterson made a while back, and like four other people all saw it and said, “Oh, that looks really amazing. I'll try that.” I was thinking CF Slack's sort of like the telegraph of our time for ColdFusion developers. It's really brought the communication points together so it's a lot easier for people to hear about stuff like this. The trick is just you have to onboard people to get them there. ‘’

A lot of people in the dark-matter-part of the ColdFusion community don't even know these conferences exist. In fact, they may not even know CF version 2016 exists. No one’s trying to make fun of people, it's just how would you hear about it if you're not on a mailing list and you're not in a social community?

They may not even know that Lucee open-source exists and that there's a free open source version of CFML.

One of the good things about this survey is a fair number of people have said after reading the results, they suddenly realize some technologies that existed that they had never heard of.

There were a couple of write-in responses. Someone said, “I had no idea there were so many options in ColdFusion.”

This could be a useful thing. It takes a lot of work to put the survey together and it takes a lot of work for everyone who fills out the survey too, but it's very valuable because it does make people aware of what new technologies are out there and what trends are out there.