125 State CF Union survey analysis (part 3: Community, Deployment and Wrapup) with Gavin Pickin – Transcript

Read the show notes and download the full episode here.

Michaela Light 0:01
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Gavin Pickin, and we're going to be talking about the third part of the State of the Union survey and all the insights about ColdFusion land and all the tools people use and trends going on. Welcome, Gavin.

Gavin Pickin 0:17
Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Michaela Light 0:18
Yeah, great to see you. And Gavin's joining us from beautiful sunny California. As you can tell from his wonderful sometime. Originally, he's from New Zealand, that probably means you can't get a suntan I'm guessing.

Gavin Pickin 0:34
I can just go more lobster red than anything else. Yeah, yeah, my brother's got a little more darker skin. But I'm just Oh, there

Michaela Light 0:42
you go. So you're the lobster. Okay, well, that's good. And he's been doing cold fusion for decades. And he is the software consultant on cold fusion, auto solutions, and does all kinds of other technologies and talks at conferences, does all kinds of cool stuff. And he was the main driving force behind content box, which is a CMS written in ColdFusion. Yep,

Gavin Pickin 1:11
did a lot of work with that. And I gotta get back to it clients. Leave me alone for a little bit so we can get some more content box love out there. There you

Michaela Light 1:18
go. So let's wait with it. Last time, we got to question 27. Now we're in the whole section around cold fusion community, which I know it's important to a lot of listeners. So let's have a look at if anyone goes to user group meetings, I think unfortunately, I'm just gonna share the screen for those watching on video, but I will talk it through just like a baseball commentator. I'm not as good as Joe Rogan at that. But you know, Gavin, and I will try and explain what we're seeing. So, you know, user groups used to be a really big thing. For ColdFusion. They're still going, there's some user groups online. But most people it seems, don't just never go to the user group meeting. And they're probably going to tell me Well, it's because there isn't one near to me, and I don't like doing it online, or I didn't know the ones online.

Gavin Pickin 2:14
And that's, I was gonna say, if they don't know there's one online, that's one thing if they don't like him, yeah, but today, we're recording this. In late October today, Charlie Earhart just basically live streamed his 300th episode of the online ColdFusion meetup. So three episodes, I know that, you know, he took over in 2007. And he's done probably 280 of them. You know, there was, I always forget the name of the guy, but if there's a history of it, but you know, he took over and he's got a lot of great things. I think there's 150 Odd speakers have spoken over the 300 episodes. And that's really awesome to see. So there are stuff out there. You know, there's a lot of user groups out there that are more online now. But um, but yeah, it's still kind of crazy that 57

Michaela Light 3:00
What online? What online ones do you know, I'll try and think of the ones I know,

Gavin Pickin 3:05
well, the main ones because they're on the CFML news podcasts that we host every week, we used to try and cover them. So Adobe does webinars and sort of user groups. I mean, this thing is what's your definition of a user group? I think it's a group of you confusing the users meeting and talking about stuff. So that way, the W webinars count, I think, you know, there's the online CF meet up. Then we've got the MidMichigan meet up, which is being run by Rick Mason. So he has that he posts about it on Facebook and stuff, and they're on YouTube. And then Nolan ERCs has a more generic user group, which is a Sacramento interactive, so second directive, and they have a lot of JavaScript stuff there too. But they meet online, and they meet about once a month. And then the CEO of Hawaii. So John bunny, it's over in Hawaii, who started up another online one recently. And then of course, all this does the webinars are I don't know if you'd call them user groups or not. But like, I would count them as that because we're, that's a group of users meeting and, you know, we take input from

Michaela Light 4:03
you have user interaction, because to me, that's the difference. Usually, the online user groups allow people to ask questions, either verbally or through chat. Yeah,

Gavin Pickin 4:11
we definitely encourage it through the chat. So that's why I think it would be called a user group. We're not just, you know, we're not just talking at you. It's meant to be interactive. And so

Michaela Light 4:21
that's where I distinguish the Adobe webinar, because as far as I know, they don't do question q&a on the chat.

Gavin Pickin 4:27
I think they try to sometimes, but it's, I guess it's borderline but yeah, so I think there's quite a few out there. So then there's probably a couple of others that I see less often. But those are the main loads that I

Michaela Light 4:42
used to do some online stuff. I don't know if they're still going.

Gavin Pickin 4:45
Yeah, there's a few like that around and so there's some and again, we always try to publish anything we find out about on the podcast and if you have one that we haven't got, but Charlie on his website kira.org. He has a section on like user groups and podcasts and old He's different resources. And you can see the list of all of them. And he tries to keep track of if they're still around or not. And so, that site, I'll try to link to the show notes. But he has a list of like user groups and lists of podcasts or lists of meetups. And so I think that's a great place to go look. And if something's not on the list, add it, you can ask him to edit. And if something no longer exists, we can update it too. So, but he's kind of got like a, I think he calls it the 411 like information on the job using profanity, and it's pretty awesome.

Michaela Light 5:29
Excellent. Yeah. So it's a great resource. Lots of cool stuff there. So yeah, other people go once a year, a few times a year. So, um, yeah, I understand.

Gavin Pickin 5:42
I think the main reason people would say no, is because Adobe, kind of like put a hold on user groups, they dropped all their funding and support for them a while ago, I tried to find one up, start one up, but they never respond to emails, they change their user group system. So I think the user groups that are more active right now aren't necessarily Adobe ones. But I know, God is really, you know, keen on getting them up and running. So I would ping Mark tocado and say, hey, I want to talk to you ColdFusion user group. I've had issues in the past trying to get a hold of someone to help me can you help? And like a lot of them are giving the Adobe Connect links out. So the newest one, I think is the one from India is a CF tech startup. And they're using the Adobe Connect. And they just started Doraemon campus one last week, I think, or two weeks ago, they've contacted all the speakers from all the conferences. And so I'll probably be giving one soon. I know Brad Woods gonna be doing one. So they're reaching out trying to stop up there. And it's an Indian timezone. They're trying to get Indian timezone Well, on that overlaps

Michaela Light 6:40
Europe pretty well, you know, so I can't quite mentally calculate how different they are. But I want to say there aren't any three or four hours.

Gavin Pickin 6:50
I think it was a 930. Indian Standard Time was 9am. central time here. So 9am Central here is like 8pm, your official time. So yeah, it's probably evening time for them. So I think that one's a good one to watch. And yeah, they're gonna try and get more speakers. And they're trying to build things up in India, get more developers they're using and that's great. Yeah,

Michaela Light 7:15
it's cool. So let's look at the next question and surveys, what CF related topics you're interested in learning this year. And let me share the screen for those watching on video. Top topic is What

Gavin Pickin 7:31
containerization, which is good now,

Michaela Light 7:34
Docker containerization. Yeah. And that's really important. You know, these days with command box and spinning up servers are doing things in the cloud. So I think

Gavin Pickin 7:45
it's great for the language, because one of the biggest complaints that I hear from businesses that their CEOs and CIOs are complaining about, we don't want to support ColdFusion, our DevOps guys don't know ColdFusion, we need to switch languages. And so if you can say, look, we've got this, you know, Adobe supported image or, you know, auto solution supported image for Docker, you just need a container like Docker, you give them this Docker image their their DevOps know what to do? So I think is, now we've got that covered, I think it really helps. It really does help the language shownotes

Michaela Light 8:24
Oh, nothing secret in our show notes. You're gonna see on the web page. My mistake, I just started to write that down. I can't I forget, I'm sharing my screen.

Gavin Pickin 8:36
But yeah, so I think that's like big for the language. Really, you know, I think it's a big plus for because a lot of companies are trying to get, you know, shafted out of ColdFusion. Hosting. ColdFusion hosting is one of those things that we've struggled with, because the licensing, which Adobe has promised that they're going to offer some free tiers, for AWS, and maybe other providers,

Michaela Light 8:54
when they promised this. So that's the FCM Summit. Yeah.

Gavin Pickin 8:57
So if you have a free tier, AWS micro instance, or whatever that you can ask ColdFusion, for free on that. And so as you build and you scale to a bigger mops thing, you'll have to scale to a paid version of Adobe ColdFusion. But that means someone who's trying it can play with it and check it out. If your business is small, and you can run off that great, and then as you scale and you become profitable, so you scale, then you can pay for it. And that's that's great, because I think that gets people into it. So the whole containerization and those type of things good for the language.

Michaela Light 9:28
It is good, good for it. And of course, the alternative is to just use Lucia and then there is no question of licensing their fusion costs. So yeah, then you can spin it up on Digital Ocean and only pay a few bucks a month.

Gavin Pickin 9:42
Yeah, for sure. The they actually have an app platform now, which I've experimented with. And love done some work. But yeah, you can actually spin up a Digital Ocean app. You know, tell it how many instances you want. Give it your code, and it's it's pretty neat. It's still there. Some stuff, it's similar to LightSail. But it's it's come a long way. So that's the first iteration of it, I'm sure it's going to only get better. So it'll be a great way to just drop something in and start.

Michaela Light 10:11
And then other things folks are interested in VS code for CF. Of course, there's a new Adobe extension for VS code. And there's a whole bunch of existing other extensions vs. Code and popular editor.

Gavin Pickin 10:24
Yep, the Kamisama k one is the most popular one out there. But Adobe's CF builder for vs. Code is, it's got some pretty cool features. And so they're working on that I think it's still officially not even released yet. It's still in the beta, public beta, extended beta,

Michaela Light 10:40
so you can download it for free and try it out.

Gavin Pickin 10:42
Yeah. So and that's, that's positive. And because I think VS code is a great tool, a lot of people using it for other languages already. So make it available for ColdFusion. That's really good. And, you know, we're trying to appel up our other tools like Scott Steinbeck and I are working on some stuff for test box integration with because they haven't use Box extinction. But there's some stuff I want to add to it, you know, improve the snippets improve the ability to run a test from a file quickly. And Scott's doing stuff where you can run snippets of code from to try sight CF from VS code. So you select some code and click the button and then it's gonna spin up a VS Code Window and run it. Sorry, I try CF window like all sorts of crazy stuff that we're trying to do. And just more tools like that will make you know, CF developers lives better. But it's, it's not too many surprising things on that list. Really, I mean, continuous integration, it's great to see that more people are wanting to see see this more use it more command box. I wonder if 36% of people aren't using it, they want to use it, or they just want to learn more about it. Because there's so much you can do. It's really awesome. But listen, and API Manager.

Michaela Light 11:53
There's a lot of modern, I think the overall thing I would take away from this is there's a lot of modern techniques and tools that CFOs want to learn. For sure, no, this just shows how alive ColdFusion is because if this was COBOL, I don't think they would be doing all these modern. I don't know if you can even run COBOL on a container. For example. Maybe there is VS code extensions for COBOL. I'm sure there are but yeah, I'm not trying to pick on COBOL. You know, you know, ColdFusion gets accused of being legacy and old fashioned. And the truth is, all these things that are out there are very modern and more modern than a lot of other, you know, dotnet or other environments have. So

Gavin Pickin 12:35
yep, for sure. That's it's good to see people looking at more testing, you know, looking at service, object oriented security. I mean, these are all good things to learn about. So and then see down on the bottom databases and multicloud. So I mean, because yeah, most people should know the database already. You know, but this does some pretty cool advancements and databases like this, the super base and you know, all the modern database thing. So that's cool. People are wanting to modernize and learn from that's, that's the way it should be.

Michaela Light 13:04
Indeed. Well, next question is about the blogs, people use the number one blog this year is what Ben Adel, and he writes about a lot of those things we just looked at, on the last question, he was actually learning new things in MySQL, you know, he, every day he publishes an article, I don't know how he has time to do any work,

Gavin Pickin 13:28
because he gets up two hours early before everybody else is awake. And that's what he does. So he dedicates time every day to it, which is, which is great. And every once awhile, you know, he like gets stuck on something, because he's working on them. When he gets done, he publishes a bunch of content. That's great. But I like the fact that he's openly exploring his thoughts there and it starts a conversation. Now, some people only plug, you know, basically, they wait to they have a 10 page novel. And and that's great for SEO to have a really big detailed in depth article. But I like the fact that Ben spits something out so people can talk about it, discuss it like we do on the podcast. And then you know, it gets people interacting. And I think we need more of that in the community. Like, I want to get the smart people together and say, Hey, I'm building a notifications network that wants to support multiple protocols for people and handle these weird rules. Like I'm sure everyone's built one before let's put our heads together, figure out what worked what didn't work and make a really awesome one and then we can all use it. You know, that's so Ben brings up these discussions people like his comments are almost as valuable as the blog posts. So whenever you read his blogs, always read the comments because there's amazing stuff in it. So um, but that that

Michaela Light 14:37
is is true and he is well worth getting, you know, subscribing or he republished his on LinkedIn or Facebook or even if he does it on Twitter or not.

Gavin Pickin 14:46
Yeah, he does. He does Twitter under the coffee hashtag and sometimes the CFML hashtag.

Michaela Light 14:51
Yeah. Other popular blogs out there. Charlie Earhart, of course, you mentioned earlier, he always has detailed blog entries on new releases and you know, hidden gems he's found and you know, any security issues, he's usually the second person in the Internet to write about it or third. So, P free tag is great for security stuff. He's really quick on the ball. For security issues. We listen to the ColdFusion community that's actually multiple people the problem that's

Gavin Pickin 15:24
actually a lot of people will repost or repurpose, or post new stuff there. But yeah, it's good to see people have gone there to check out stuff. Obviously, there'll be post their stuff there. If you want to see anything from Adobe, that's where you gotta go. We're trying to republish it from there outside that so we'll always watch it and we have a couple of subscribers RSS feed re feed readers that I use to try and get the content in the in the, in the podcast, and then I know Pete Fridays, or is it free tag always say Friday probably is free day. And then he has the CF braking mail newsletter that it talks about all the latest posts from everywhere. So that's always good to keep up on to but then obviously, you're wanting you're up there. Brad's up there. The oldest solution blog is up there fusion reactor, Nolan irk. Not true grid. It knows many people who's writing on that. And Tony junkies, I haven't seen too much. But I didn't see Matthew Clemente on that list. He's got a pretty good blow.

Michaela Light 16:20
In for next, Michael. Yeah,

Gavin Pickin 16:21
Michael born, I had one that died because I didn't realize that my domain name was on an old email address expired, and someone picks it up and is trying to sell it back to me for $50,000. So I'm gonna change my URL, and I'll repost it. It's pretty old content, but I don't want or most of the time anyway. So. But James Murdoch has a blog. We should probably put him on the list too. Yeah. Podcast list and give you a list of the ones we look at.

Michaela Light 16:49
Yeah, do and there's also some blog aggregators out there. I think it's called as CF feed, or I forget the name of it.

Gavin Pickin 16:56
I don't know if it's still working news.

Michaela Light 16:58
I think we was watching a while ago. Yeah,

Gavin Pickin 17:01
well, I need to find the aggregators. And then we need to aggregate the aggregators, because I really do think we need to have a good cold fusion, one that publishes everybody's stuff. Because

Michaela Light 17:09
there's at least one and maybe two that I'm aware of, and I'm sorry, I'm on the exact URLs. But

Gavin Pickin 17:16
I think if we don't have a good one, we should get it up and running again. Because

Michaela Light 17:20
the guy who did that new CMS for cold fusion, I'm spacing on his name,

Gavin Pickin 17:25
sir. Oh, you mean, the Galaxy blog by Greg Elexon?

Michaela Light 17:30
Yeah, yeah, I think he did a feed. Well, he

Gavin Pickin 17:32
was asking about what blocks add to it. So he may have one, I just don't know if he has everybody on it or not. But anyway, we got to get to the community and put one together, because I think it'd be great just to have one place to go look for all the CFO blogs. So I think we should definitely

Michaela Light 17:50
look like that. I'm pretty sure there's several out there. I've seen him. I'm sorry, I'm not.

Gavin Pickin 17:57
But if you've not remember later, ping me because that's something I've actually wanted to get up and running is more content like that. Yeah. Part of the home CFML rocks. Thing that Odyssey is doing is trying to get more publicity and marketing for CFML, in general. And that's one of the things we wanted to highlight is every bit of content from every blogger from every video from every podcast that has anything to do with cold fusion. So we really want to basically bring all that together and make it easy to find and easy to look at. So that's one of the things I'm trying to do in that. So excellent. So yeah,

Michaela Light 18:29
the mega feed. Yep. Now we've talked about blogs, I think the next thing to look at is cold fusion conferences. So top conference this year was what? None? None. Don't go to conferences. Yeah. So we listed developer week. Yeah, we listed online conferences, because it's been a bit of a funny year for travel.

Gavin Pickin 18:55
Yeah. So that's not bad. So almost 100 people there and I know they had a lot of signups they had a couple of 1000 people sign up. So that shows how many people will take the survey. We got to get more people take the survey. So if you guys are watching this, you don't take the survey or you know, people that didn't take it, please share it next year. We want more people submitting their liquidations and answers so but yeah, ColdFusion developer week. That's that's good to see. 98 into the boxes pretty high again. And then profusion Summit West and East. Now, I know that the West one is the Vegas conference is the east the government one.

Michaela Light 19:31
Yeah, the one they they've had in Washington DC but I don't think they had it this year. Yeah, they did. They substituted developer week instead.

Gavin Pickin 19:39
Okay, that's what I thought they'd done. So because the other early developer weekend they had a later developer week, and then see a lot of people. They're hoping to see if Kent won't be around to a tee. Yes.

Michaela Light 19:50
Well, we didn't know when the service was published back in January. People didn't know if it was going to happen or not. So yeah, maybe this was like they wanted To go to it.

Gavin Pickin 20:01
So that's good. That's a good coverage and audits developer week who fusion summit India. So there's there's some people that want to go to that too. So

Michaela Light 20:09
a lot of people I did a post asking who would go to CF summit India if it if it happened. And I forget how many people answered that, but a lot. Very cool. So and when it was last held in 2019, before the COVID stuff, I want to say or at least 100 people were maybe more, maybe 120. I forget, it was quite, it was a good event, you know, and of course, all the Adobe engineers are there in India. So, you know, it's very rich for technical thing and being able to talk to the folks directly so, and it wasn't just Indians who went there. I went there. And there were several other people, Americans who went who happened, you know, I guess they would, I don't think they flew to India, just to go to the conference. I think they were in the area. And they said, well, heck, it was cold fusion conference, I'm going to do the excuse

Gavin Pickin 20:58
to go and visit you know, like, I want to go see some cricket matches in India being a cricket fan. And India's a cricket loving nation. So I want to definitely check that out. So you know, they are

Michaela Light 21:09
well, next time it happens. And then we've got some other events artist developer week. Max, which is happening, I think, is max happening this week or next week. It's pretty soon gonna happen.

Gavin Pickin 21:18
I think it happened last week or last week. Yeah, I know. It started already. It's pretty big. And then out of the box, the town was gonna be later this year in December. Then in San Salvador, El Salvador. We got a a big thing going on there. So last year, we did a virtual because the COVID. But the year before, I believe, or maybe the year before that. The first one we did, the other government got behind it. The universities got behind him and a bunch of nudes developers from Java and all these other languages. And they never heard of ColdFusion. So they had none of the stigma. There was no dead ColdFusion there wasn't they didn't know what it was. They saw it. They saw it was ACMA script, it was like Java and JavaScript, but fast on the server, and they loved it. And so it's it's a really a big market. And we've got a pretty big team down there in El Salvador. Now we got 25. You know how employees down in El Salvador? A lot of them doing cold fusion, we got QA people, we've got designers, we've got a lot of different people working in our team. And yeah, we're trying to grow it. We're working on trying to get more youth learning out there, too. So one of the one of the often that maybe we

Michaela Light 22:25
can transplant the youth learning to cold fusion into the United States will be Well, first you

Gavin Pickin 22:30
didn't hear what, what Brian SAP you talked about in the keynote, because he talked all about some education stuff. So I have to say you should you should try to get Brian sappy on a podcast, because he had a great talk about I spoke with him during the, you know, a couple of the breaks and whatever. He's doing some really cool stuff with education in North Carolina, working with schools, getting junior high school kids and the teachers trained. And it's actually going pretty good because the high schools and the colleges are already sitting whatever languages they're doing. Yeah, he's doing some cool stuff. I'm actually I got a blog. I'm writing about it to release, because, uh, you know, Odyssey is gonna talk to him, because we're doing stuff in Salvador, where the the youth of the orphanages they're trying to get oh, wow, learning. And so we're taking the CF mod and CFML book, and we're trying to make it more kid friendly. But Brian did some cool stuff with Raspberry Pi's, they installed Adobe ColdFusion 2021 on it, they took the Raspberry Pi's home. So now they don't have a server at home. It's it's pretty cool. It's decent, some great work. So yeah. But I think there's more of those done.

Michaela Light 23:39
I'll miss Franklin Roosevelt, or Herbert Hoover, or whoever, whichever US president said a chicken in every home and we have a coefficient server in every home.

Gavin Pickin 23:48
Yeah, but raspberry pies and stuff. It's not hard. Like they can have the ones that have a keyboard built in with a Raspberry Pi in it. You just plug a monitor and you're done. Yeah. So very cool.

Michaela Light 24:00
It is cool. I actually have a computer science friend. He's a professor of computer science. And he goes to a country in Africa and they they give out raspberry pies. And it can help kids learn programming to get out of the poverty that that's there is, you know, really cool.

Gavin Pickin 24:21
So next on the list is online communities.

Michaela Light 24:25
Yes, let's have a look online communities.

Gavin Pickin 24:29
So I was surprised that we had only 48% of the people that did the survey said they're on CFML slash to sickness that's got a pretty big number of people.

Michaela Light 24:42
And 1000s Yeah, 70,000 I think I want to say

Gavin Pickin 24:46
I mean, I know some people don't like Slack is distracting and whatnot but looks like there's a good number of people using StackOverflow and then face like 23% of people using Facebook groups as

Michaela Light 24:59
well to me the The advantage of StackOverflow and Facebook groups and the thing you guys autist created in discourse is it's a threaded discussion. And so you have a subject line in effect, and then you have, you know, it's threaded, right, and all the comments are in the same place. The problem with for me one, I have many issues with Slack, I will admit, but one of the issues is everything's interleaved. You know, someone's talking about subject day, and then someone talks or gives a reply on subject B, and then someone talks about subject G, here. And so it's very hard to follow. They need

Gavin Pickin 25:29
to create threads, they need to be religious about creating a thread. And every time they start a new question, yeah, and that way, it can automatically separate it. But you're right, it doesn't last for that long. It's not Google and the theme or, which is one of the people that people don't like, but you can get to the slack content, Shawn hopefield, set up a link to be able to access slack content on our site, and I've got the link somewhere, I'll try and find it. But that is Google indexable. And if we take that, and then actually do something with it, we can, you know, we could basically, you know, make that more searchable. Yeah, and see the other thing too, like the oddest community, we have a box slack. And most people get on there to ask questions and Brad's usually their time. But once we get a good enough question and answer thread together, then we usually try and pull it over to the community site and put a bigger answer there. So it lives longer. So it's a good idea to put a one off little things. Slack is great sure that if it develops something bigger than we usually try to move to the community, so to live longer, because we're we're aware of that, like we have such great knowledge shared. And not just people in the box team slack. Sometimes, like Sam Knowlton comes in and answers all these questions about picking QB because he's like a little mini s, you know, he's a mini Eric comes to that stuff. He uses it all the time. And like he answers questions. So there's a lot of great stuff we don't want to lose. So

Michaela Light 26:54
I analyzed the stand the immediacy, you know, if you're stuck on something, it's helpful to get, but I find the Facebook groups people pile in with answers within hours, you know, usually, if not minutes, depending on the question. Yeah.

Gavin Pickin 27:07
And a lot of Facebook, you never see anywhere

Michaela Light 27:10
else. Oh, well, there you go. It's good to have different groups in different places it is

Gavin Pickin 27:15
and why don't we try? The content there?

Michaela Light 27:18
Yeah, the community, the Adobe community portal, there's some good answers and questions there. But it's a lot slower. cycle, you know, it might take a week or so at least several days. Twitter, a lot of people are on Twitter, but it seems to be more about ColdFusion. news and announcements. I've never, I don't think I've ever seen someone say I'm having this coding problem. Can you help me out? Yeah, that's mean, you couldn't do that. But yeah,

Gavin Pickin 27:42
I've noticed that sometimes like James Moberg will throw out something that he's run into and ask for some feedback or help. I don't think he uses Slack. So that's probably why he uses Twitter. But But yeah, I see a lot of lot of little things like that. But you're right, mainly, it's about blogs, or events or whatever. And to be honest, a lot of it's, you know, audits posting about different things. But a lot of stuff to talk about I know. But you know, it's good to see that much people on Twitter using it. And I think it's more. I use it more for professional. I don't touch Facebook during the day when I'm at work, but I'll touch Twitter because it's shorter, more work related. So if I get on Facebook, I get pounded with too much stuff. So I don't look at work.

Michaela Light 28:25
Yes, I do actually use Facebook work because you know, we have a Facebook group for CF live and that confusion program or group I go into, but I do have to be careful not to get addicted to the other crap that's in Facebook. Some people I have friends who have tools that kind of screen out all the feed and other irritations so they can just go to the group do their thing and come out. LinkedIn does have some it has one really big, you know, 7000 or 8000 people on there. So yeah, it's good. But it doesn't seem to be particularly active. As far as I can tell. No, I

Gavin Pickin 29:01
think to be honest, a lot of people join them over the years, and they've kind of moved on. So it shows how many people could have been here, but they're not. But like when Ben Adele posts, he's got a pretty big following. So a lot of people check on his stuff. And, you know, and like you said, there's a couple of discourse forums, too. So there's a Lucy discourse forum. There's an oldest discourse, Community Forum. And then, yeah, the CF live. So you guys have the Facebook group, right?

Michaela Light 29:28
Yeah, we're the Facebook group is not that active, I'll just be honest, has some great people in it. When I was publishing my book, that's why I use that to publish chapters of the book and it was very active then. To kind of give people a preview, you know, I sent draft chapters out, it was kind of like a beta. Yeah, that's not a thing. And it was good idea, actually. Yeah. Oh, I recommend it for any book or other thing, you know, have a group of people who are keen on something and give comments, give the give early feedback. It's great. Thank

Gavin Pickin 29:59
you. He's interested in is 89% say they're in no communities, then how did

Michaela Light 30:06
they 10 21%? Oh, yeah, you're right.

Gavin Pickin 30:09
89 people are 21%. But 21% of the people who fill out the survey, they didn't they didn't participate in communities, but they found the survey. That's interesting. So

Michaela Light 30:18
well, we send out an email to the entire terrific list. I think, I think autists might have done that. I forget this year. I think you guys did usually. Reactor guys did as well.

Gavin Pickin 30:30
Yeah. So it's just one of those things. You think if they're if they're on one of those lists, they're probably from some community event. Interesting. Now.

Michaela Light 30:38
There are people who have gone on to lists but they don't engage in communities.

Gavin Pickin 30:44
Yeah, that's fair enough. So

Michaela Light 30:46
you know, and then there's a whole you know, Charlie Earhart talks about this. You know, there's people who do ColdFusion, nine to five, and they just don't want to go spending extra time learning about stuff,

Gavin Pickin 31:00
I call them to fivers. And then I call the people like me the life is, you know, we live our life.

Michaela Light 31:07
Aygo, ColdFusion life. So it's, I mean, if anyone listening has ideas, how we can reach out people who are you know, they are nine doing coffee tonight, five, and they aren't in online communities, we'd love to hear. Yeah, I'm gonna say they may be missing out on some really cool, you know, things they could help make their job easier make, you know, the ColdFusion apps better?

Gavin Pickin 31:29
Yeah, that's the thing is like, you know, if they do their job well, and they've got everything they need, that's fine. But I think a lot of times is if you have the knowledge available, and you choose not to use it, that's one thing, but not knowing it exists is a different thing. And, you know, I've met people that have no idea who Ben Adele is added who is before? And I'm like, How can you do cold fusion and not know who'd been the delas? Or re Candon? I'm like, yes. You know, raised lower down the list now that he's talking more about a doe, Charlie

Michaela Light 31:57
arehart would be, you know, Oh, yeah.

Gavin Pickin 31:59
But it's just like, they're like household names. For the last one years, you know, you think you might have seen them a few? Do you type in CFML? In the search engine? You see Bing, and Charlie, you know, so if you've ever Googled something, you would have heard of them. But yeah, some people live in the hole. But anyway, that's nice.

Michaela Light 32:16
I mean, I do think it's important to know what's available, you don't have to be an actor, it's impossible to be an expert on everything cold fusion. But I think it really does help to know what exists. And that's one of the things I did in my book, I wanted to list all the tools that were available at the time and all the different techniques and what have you. So and the same with the survey every year, one of the reasons to look at the survey, even I encourage people to take the survey, if you don't want to take the survey, at least look at the results and see, well, what are the popular tools? What are the popular sites? What are the techniques I've missed out on? You know, what are the testing tools? What are the CMS is whatever, because if you don't know it exists, you can't even conceive of using it to solve some problem you have.

Gavin Pickin 33:02
And yep, and then, of course, when you guys publish the results for the trends of the survey with Brad coming soon, coming soon, you better see how those, you know, those tools are getting more popular over time, or maybe less popular, and frameworks are going up. And I'm really excited to see all that have been watching you guys get all the data compiled. So yeah, it's gonna be great. But the signal is really great. And the next the next section that was like open source tools. So what tools are out there and available? And are you allowed to use them? And you know, because yes,

Michaela Light 33:34
we asked if this was an inspiration, I and Brad had a few because Brad and I and other people around the community contribute, how can we improve the survey? And one of the things I thought would be useful, you know, because some of us are so steeped in using tools and open source, we can't even conceive that you wouldn't be allowed to at your company. But I thought know that there actually are people who aren't allowed to know. But yeah,

Gavin Pickin 33:57
there's definitely a lot of them. And look, 47% of people are not sorry, they are allowed. Not allowed a person say, yeah, right.

Michaela Light 34:06
So obviously, there are some companies that have this mentality, open source is dangerous. And, you know, it might infect their code, or I don't know, I'm exaggerating here. But yeah, what had a policy that says they must not use it.

Gavin Pickin 34:20
Yeah. And so a lot of times people will reinvent the wheel because they have to. And now, I mean, that's okay, too. I mean, sometimes you need to have, you know, really strict code reviews. And I know that being Adel talked about that before, where if he uses an open source tool, sometimes, you know, it takes a lot more work to get it approved. And maybe it was Adam title as well. It's like open source tools need, you know, they need to be reviewed to so you didn't write it so you don't understand it as well. So the person has to and one of the things when you use an open source tool is you know, there's like a checklist you should ask yourself, like, does it solve my problems? Does it solve more than I need? Like, does it do way more than I need as a tool? complicated. You know, there's I did a session with Charlie on the online CF meetup about, you know, like, when should you use a third party library versus roll your own and sort of kind of have to reevaluate some of those things for sometimes, it's not worth using a tool, because it does wait too much, you need a little piece. And maybe it's going a different direction that you need to go, you know, so, yeah, but I think it's interesting to see, you know, most people are using open source. Half of them are allowed to use it, which is interesting.

Michaela Light 35:34
That's great. Some of them are just using it without being allowed to use it. Yeah, that's because they don't have any policy, right, they don't have a policy against it. And they're not pro it. But

Gavin Pickin 35:43
yeah, and it's really cool to see like, 27.8% of people are contributing to open source projects, that's great. With hack Tober going on, right now, Oktoberfest, Lou, you guys can get teachers for contributing to open source projects. But that an Oktoberfest was actually invented, so people can learn how to, you know, contribute to open source. And so those 11% Hopefully, you guys will reach out, and we can help you get up to speed. Because Oktoberfest is encouraging people to get an involve open source, whether it's, you know, writing documentation or typos, they're still contributing. You know, there's lots of ways you can contribute about writing code. And to be honest, jumping into a repo and trying to write code right away is probably the worst thing you can do. Sometimes it's best to get to know the code, the pull requests, you know, flow. You know, big projects usually have a lot of structure to try and make it easier on the maintainers. But a lot of times they need help with documentation or examples. And like CF Docs is a great resource. And Pete needs help with getting samples, you know, adding different methods. And he's got a huge issue list that he made, because he could do it all, but he's made a list of people can contribute. It's really cool. So

Michaela Light 36:54
now I encourage people listening to use open source. And if you you know, if you can contribute, I've talked about this in other podcasts, there's many ways to contribute. Yeah, sure. So and they can be you can start off small. You know, you can help fix the documentation, or that's the main suggestions. Yeah. So go open source. Yeah. What's the next topic here? Podcast channels, which includes podcasts like this one, and you're one moderniser die.

Gavin Pickin 37:26
Yeah. So that's kind of cool. So moderniser die podcast renumber. One we'll see if cast though video training platform, so a lot of great content in there free and pay. That was your CF, a live podcast and our podcast been top three is really nice. And it's good to see the working code podcast is in there as well. So 9% of people listen to that.

Michaela Light 37:49
That that's does ColdFusion. But I think they cover other things too, don't they?

Gavin Pickin 37:54
It's more. Yeah, it's not very competition based at all. It's people that have worked in ColdFusion. before. So it's got add on title, Carolyn Hamilton. She's changed her name recently. I was gonna last name now. And then Tim Cunningham and then been the Dow. But it's interesting because they talk about just developer problems or thought processes. And, you know, sometimes it relates to confusion. Sometimes it doesn't. So, but it's good to see the podcasts and localhost podcasts was a really good one, too. But lots of YouTube channels here too. Yeah,

Michaela Light 38:25
there's that on his YouTube channel. And there will be one the terror attack one that might be one or two others knocking around, but those are the most popular ones. And then there are people who don't have listened to any or watch any channels. So about 50% of people don't you're missing out, guys. Now I understand some people love hearing stuff, because they're working out or they're commuting or whatever they're doing. And they can listen to the podcast while they're doing something else. I understand that not everyone's like that. And some people like to learn by reading and some people like to watch videos, some people like to hear stuff. So just to be fair to those people. You know, maybe they just don't learn well, by hearing stuff.

Gavin Pickin 39:05
Yeah, like videos are really good. When you got time to watch. Sometimes I'll listen to them and see if I actually want to watch them later. You know, because I can't watch them while I'm working. But sometimes I'll listen to see if it covers something I'm actually interested in. But like the Learn CF in a week, do they actually have video content too? Or is it just to learn see if in a week website

Michaela Light 39:24
and stuff I can I think they have some content they put out I couldn't tell you exactly what I think they have. I'll have to check. But here let me unshare the screens so I can quickly see f which is great site by the way, if anyone hasn't looked at it, even if you know see if you can I learned new things by going there they revamped it for I think, is it revamp for ColdFusion 2018 or ColdFusion 2020. Yeah,

Gavin Pickin 39:51
they just revamped it a couple of years ago. I think the domain expired and then they rebuilt repurchase it and it's it's good.

Michaela Light 39:58
You know $50,000 Like you're done may not?

Gavin Pickin 40:00
I hope not. I think it was just a more of an Adobe DNS issue or something. But yeah, they got it back up and running. And yeah, they do they go back and recheck it

Michaela Light 40:09
they haven't made looks like we have a YouTube, they have some YouTube. Oh no, this is me interviewing them this is my YouTube oops. Yeah, sure, well, they have some kind of a now they have some kind of channel, I'm a little confused, I'll see if

Gavin Pickin 40:29
there was one I wasn't aware of. So maybe that's kind of somebody I'd add to my list so I can check out their content. So you can always learn something from sort of everybody. So

Michaela Light 40:39
it is good. Well, we're going to be the next topic is deployment. So we're going to look at that next. So this sectional survey covers a whole bunch of deployment questions how you know, where you deploy a server, what hosting service use security, Docker images, all kinds of stuff. So let's jump into that. First thing in here is what kind of developer development setups use, because people often develop on a different setup from Yeah, production.

Gavin Pickin 41:11
Yep, there's definitely a few different flavors here. I mean, the old school days, we would have that shared development server, which looks like it's like number two, number two, and number two development server and oh, that's the shared development database server and a shared development web server. So looks like almost 50% of people are either using a shared database server or shared web server. And then it looks like the top one, obviously. So people are installing their engine on their PC, and command boxes up to 44%. And so I like the command box, because that way I can have, you know, Adobe, cf 21, for one client, WCF 2018, for another client and command walks, and when I spin it up, it spins up the version I want. And then when I'm doing a talk, you know, I can say, well, let's see if this runs in 2018. Let's see if this runs in 2016. I can just make a change. And smart box lets me do that. I can check that version. And like, Nope, it blows up like crazy. I guess this tag wasn't supported in 2016. So let me go back to 2018. So I like that. But, you know, a local installation is was pretty common for a lot of people who don't have a lot of clients. So that makes sense. And then, so the people using local development database, so local database 32 33%. That's kind of nice. It's interesting to see vagrant and Docker. Actually, I haven't used vagrant for a long time. And I haven't made a handmade VM for any time, but some people think Docker is too confusing. And they'd prefer to use a grid. Yeah. Oh. And I was like, I don't think so. But okay, no, but so yeah, so 9% handmade, handmade vm 3% For vagrant. And then Docker 25%. So that's, that's pretty good. And down

Michaela Light 42:58
on the bottom by code on production? 5%. Probably not a good idea. But I understand sometimes people do it.

Gavin Pickin 43:07
Yeah, I mean, like debugging, the production is a little different than coding on production, but and then they don't have a development environment. Six people. Yeah. So I guess that means maybe that the code on production two, because it's six, you know,

Michaela Light 43:21
we don't know what the other means we'd have the right answers. Let's have a look at production deployments and setups. So manage servers, I guess that's hosted somewhere or via virtual private server, those are two popular ones, containers moving up 20%. So fewer people using containers in production than they do on development. And I guess that's why do you think that is arguable? I

Gavin Pickin 43:48
think a lot of it could be AWS, because the AWS AMI is kind of doing well, but because they're, they're more like a server too. But I think Docker allows people on whichever, you know, if you're running Windows, or Linux or whatever, to run the same environment, the same type of system as your production servers. If you're running Linux, in your managed server or your VPS. And you're on a Windows machine, and Docker, you can least run it in the wind, like in a Linux setup. And so it's it's more like production. So that's possibly why. So it's a way to make your development more like production, which is a pretty interesting, but But yeah, I mean, building your own servers is still the top. So building,

Michaela Light 44:31
I just resorted it so it could come on top.

Gavin Pickin 44:35
So yeah, so those people that basically have a server and they manage everything themselves, the managed servers, people are actually having someone like host take, basically manage the server and they just put their code on and, and run it with a VPS is basically, you know, a virtual private server. And so that's probably a mixture of managed and build your own. But a shared hosting is still there. There's not as many people running that anymore. I know that

Michaela Light 45:00
containers, what's the point? Yeah? Well, it's with a container, isn't it? No, you can get a container for your container for about, they start at five bucks on DigitalOcean.

Gavin Pickin 45:11
So if I can say I have just for a decent load you

Michaela Light 45:15
can have, yeah, well, like it will be on the same container may

Gavin Pickin 45:19
well, but the thing is, then you've got to set it up the right way, right. So setting up a container to be multi support is not as easy. So like most, mostly out of the box, ones have one server, you can do it. And command box, we just updated it to let you to do like the connector stuff. So we can actually run a one command box Docker image with multiple sites Now previously, that wasn't available. And so the shared hosting, that was an easy way to say, Hey, I've got a server, I can spin them up, you know, I'll share my CPU all CMI RAM. And if you know, if I need that two gigs of RAM, when I spin up my site, I can use it, but then everybody else can use it after that. And so it was a lot cheaper. But I think if we start doing more, you know, multi site, sort of Docker, like you said, you can do it, it's just not easy right now, I think it's gonna improve, that's gonna go higher as we go forward. But even if you have your own managed servers, you probably still want to shop duck Docker on there. I love the fact that I can put a Docker Swarm on a single instance. So even if I just have one server, I just say Docker Swarm in it. And now it's a swarm, even, there's only one item. And if I start up a service, like my ColdFusion server, even if it's just Lucy, and I have all my sites and folders are all mapped. If Lucy crashes, it'll restart the image because it's under swarm mode, it'll restart that service, it'll never die. When it dies, it starts again. And so it just stops me from having to secure reinet it. So all my old legacy stuff where I don't want to pay per Docker image, I have one big Docker image with all my old legacy sites in there for my my old customers, you know, like friends and family that have little blogs, they can all run on one little one container, they can share their memory and RAM. But on the swarm mode, at least restart itself. You know, there's some there's some health checks and stuff. And so that works. But yeah, it's it was harder to get set up. So things are definitely on the improve.

Michaela Light 47:13
Let us move on to hosting services since we're talking about hosting. Yep. Always a popular question on the forums. Yeah. So most people are doing in house?

Gavin Pickin 47:24
Well, AWS is just as high as 34.1 is an equal? Yeah, that's very good. And

Michaela Light 47:33
host tech is the top, you know, actual ColdFusion host and then DigitalOcean, Microsoft Azure. They're all cloud things. And then Rackspace. I think that's a virtual private thing. I don't think we do cold fusion per se.

Gavin Pickin 47:49
No, they don't. Linode same. You know, you can do a bit of both. But yeah, you can do colocation with Rackspace, and stuff. But the most of these ones now, you can basically spin up a managed server or VPS, or just a bare metal box. But Linode has actually got some really good deals, they got some good pricing, and they help support try, see if you know they give, try, see if Abram Adams some, some good pricing on all that stuff to be able to provide that for the community. So it's really nice to have that. So if you're not sure who you want to go, Linode is, is a good one to support. So, but Vivio they're, they're obviously a big ColdFusion hosts. And then we also have the hosts will host my site, I used to use them. So used to have ColdFusion hosting, we did co locating with them for a while they got purchased by hosting.com They got some of the different services sold out. So there's very little ColdFusion lift and host my site and I think hosting.com Now and their their official name was like nip finit NIF. These are this is a new name. I don't think that's the

Michaela Light 49:05
rehand some clients who were you know, they got moved into how it didn't work very well. I just am,

Gavin Pickin 49:14
because in Irvine, they had a colocation location. And so we had 10 servers, 1010 servers and a rack there for one of my clients. And we finally got them all moved over to cloud stuff after all this time, because again, they just had

Michaela Light 49:28
the same thing happened. This is very common with hosting companies, they get bought out by larger hosting companies rolled up and then unfortunately, unless you're lucky, they kind of lose the engineering talent and help support and that happened. I think with edge edge hosting used to be a really high quality ColdFusion host. They kind of you know moved. They continue with the cold fusion but they got bought out by databank and they still do cold fusion. They still have some good engineers there but it's clearly got a bit diluted.

Gavin Pickin 49:58
Yeah, that's that's it. thing is we need to support more of these smaller hosts. And it's because we got sort of two developer personas here, right? We got people that are doing their own hobby sites and everything. And then small businesses. And most people these days with Docker and the VPS prices, you can get your own little VPS. But the shared hosting sort of like friends and family are your little hobby blog, that we just don't have a very good hosts for right now host tech is doing some good stuff there. They're trying to improve and you know, auditors trying to work with some of these hosts and coalition to to try and get,

Michaela Light 50:31
maybe there's an opportunity to set up a hosting company in El Salvador?

Gavin Pickin 50:34
Well, we could, we've talked about it first, a lot of El Salvador customers down there. Yeah, and there's a lot of people that are wanting good hosting, and whether it's static or not, and, you know, trying to take advantage of Cloudflare CD ends and other things, for trying to just do what we can, because that's something we hear a lot is that people want good ColdFusion hosting.

Michaela Light 50:53
I mean, I think just to be fair to hosting companies, having talked to people who run hosting companies, it can be a lot of work, you know, you may think, Oh, they're not doing anything, they're always doing updates, and then people complain about stuff or having problems. Yeah, you know, it's one of

Gavin Pickin 51:07
those things that you only hear from the customer when they're mad. You know, it's not a very good environment. But you know, host taking video of us both for them for different things. I mean, really happy with them, you know, but it's support is expensive. And, you know, it's not their fault. That is expensive, but it is expensive. And, you know, you either pay for your services, or you get cheaper services, but then you have to pay more for support. But you know, what it's like, if something goes down, you could, it could be a long time to fix it. So it's tough, but it's hard to be secured to there's a lot of security issues and when you're doing shared hosting. Yeah. So it's something that, you know, we have to understand, and I think if you can support like VO and hosting, that's great. And if you want to get to VPs and stuff, they have some good offerings there too. But then they have free offerings. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of other tools out there. If you're going DigitalOcean, or AWS, there's a lot of great options. It looks like when people are using some pretty good ones here. I just actually found a customer. They're switching to Oracle Cloud. I've never even heard of it. So Oracle has their own cloud platform. So first customer ever let's move in there. So Wow. Yeah, Google is not on that list. Deeper, right? Google Cloud Platform.

Michaela Light 52:21
No, Google Cloud isn't on there. We should we should add Google arrow, right in Google Cloud into thing I know, I'm screen sharing. Further up. It was further up. It's here. So Google Cloud, Google, cloud,

Gavin Pickin 52:41
maybe to do Oracle, but there's tons out there like Vulture and a bunch, but they're all very much like clones with other ones. You know,

Michaela Light 52:50
I'm not spelling it. Right. But there's some Chinese company, I think it's called out baleia or something like that. Yeah, they have a lot. They have an AWS knockoff. That's about a quarter of the price has a lot most of the features, it's,

Gavin Pickin 53:04
we have a lot of great options out there for sure.

Michaela Light 53:08
I'm not sure I really want to host my sights on a Chinese server. Apologies to any Chinese people listening. But for sure, I'm just a bit concerned about the Chinese government. For those people doing Docker, let's look at what Docker images folks are using. So

Gavin Pickin 53:25
number one, yep.

Michaela Light 53:28
All is command box image.

Gavin Pickin 53:30
Well, that says with Lucy, and you'll see that there are some using command box with the Adobe ones as well. But it looks like a lot of people doing their custom image. And so not that's pretty close behind. And that's kind of nice. And this thing with Docker, you can kind of pick and choose, but your official Lucy image and the official Adobe images, they've improved a lot. For a few years ago, when they first came out, the oldest one, you know, like, I think was leaps and bounds ahead, because we built all the tools that were driving us crazy to make it better. And so you know, they're they've really done a lot of things to improve. And Charlie did a great session at the end of the box pre conference on the three different images and what's good, you know, and like different setup configurations, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And there's some similarities and some differences. But But yeah, Charlie did a good session on that. And I think that's probably good talk. I'll try and get the link for you later, but still empty. But yeah, so there's a lot of good options there. But the custom image, you know, like, you can take the Lucy one or the w one or the command box one and build on top of that. And we highly recommend taking the command box one and building a multistage on top of it. Because you can even finalize your code when you release it. So it's all like bite. It's already Java byte compiled and everything and like makes you get rid of command box. It just gives you straight to undertow. So like there's no there's none of that starting up like you're straight into it like they start like that they're crazy fast. So wow, when you get to the production deployment, you can really strip down all the pieces. And it's really great. And John Colson has done an amazing job with all that stuff. He just did a blog post a couple of weeks ago, about, you know, crunching your stuff down to Java bytecode, to make it even faster. So I'll put a link for that in there, too. But it's, yeah, it's a really cool talk. So you can definitely do some good stuff with all of them. But using a Docker image, you know, building on top of it. It's, it's pretty cool. And with Docker Compose, you know, you could spin up a Redis server alongside of it and everything as well. So you could do some Redis caching and scale

Michaela Light 55:42
it so let's talk about deployment tools, then what tools do people use for deploying? I'm shocked, most people are using FTP. I'm not

Gavin Pickin 55:51
shocked at all, you're not shocked. Unfortunately, a lot of people are still using FTP. But I mean, the good thing is, is FTP works. Now you FTP from your local machine to production that may not be as friendly. But you know, sometimes you can use a pipeline. And then the last step could still be an FTP at the end, you know, if you're not using Docker or something, you could use our sync or FTP to get the files out there in the end. And that's still cool. You know, whatever it takes, but there's a lot of pipelines here. We've got the

Michaela Light 56:23
pipeline scripting tools, Jenkins git lab, get actions BitBucket Pipelines. Yep, command box task runners. Yeah. As your DevOps, AWS code deploy all kinds of stuff.

Gavin Pickin 56:36
Yeah. So there's a lot of different ones here. But But yeah, we know GitHub actions has come a long way. Because obviously Microsoft took over GitHub and made you know, private stuff free unless you're have a big teams and everything and they added GitHub actions like that killed a lot of Travis's work and circle CI, a lot of people on GitHub before were using both of them. But GitHub actions is pretty neat. Get labs got some great CI tools. I love using their CI tools, but Bitbucket, they're pretty good to customers using BitBucket. And so their pipelines, they're pretty great too. And then inside of those, obviously, you'll use bash and Gulp, sometimes people still use and we use task buffs, tasks from above Saturn has a lot for, you know, running our tests and doing all those little pieces during our build. But yeah, there's a lot of great ones here. And they're all got very similar features. So a lot of it comes down to where's your source control? If your source control? Is that one of them, you can use that. But yeah, like Bitbucket, GitHub and GitLab all have great source control tools now, and their pipelines are all very good. You know, and there are a lot of different but

Michaela Light 57:47
that, yes, 30 people don't automate their deployments or builds, they're missing out.

Gavin Pickin 57:53
Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people do FTP, and you know, stuff like that. But even that, I would have some type of arcing script that I run from bash. So I only update the files that have changed, you know, or something. This, but then again, that's, that's just me, you know, if you do something more than the three or four times, it's probably worth, you know, automating it, whether it's a bash script, or, you know, if you're using PowerShell, write a PowerShell script, you know, something to just make it more repetitive. A lot of our repos actually have a workbench folder, and inside that we have scripts that you run for deploying to dev or deploying to production, and it'll actually do certain things. That was before we had to call pipelines. So highly recommend using something but each to their own ego.

Michaela Light 58:42
Let us move on to question 40, which is about monitoring tools. Make sure your confusion isn't going slow or crashing, pop most popular monitoring tool in the survey, folks is

Gavin Pickin 58:54
fusion reactor. It's a great tool. Yes, it is

Michaela Light 58:57
a great tool. And he just came out with version nine. I'm going to be interviewing David Tattersall from enteral, who made fusion reactor in a few weeks. So really valuable. And then there's a built in of cold fusion performance monitor that comes with Adobe ColdFusion, 2018 and 2021. Then just people this summer, various other ones, but there are a lot smaller use homegrown CloudWatch data dog see fusion, you know,

Gavin Pickin 59:28
I'm surprised to see fusion is so far down. That's a pretty solid product

Michaela Light 59:33
isn't being maintained. I don't think

Gavin Pickin 59:35
oh, I don't know. I mean, Charlie, well, no, it was actually

Michaela Light 59:38
designed to flee as fusion reactor.

Gavin Pickin 59:44
Yeah, they definitely do a lot more. They're a lot more visible. But they also do stuff for JVM, other JVM languages. So they tried to build tools that were for coefficient and other people. But once on the other I don't see which I'm surprised about is like century before. More bug logging. But maybe that's something different. But data dog sort of bug logging. So I can do that. So, sentry is a big one, we use robots and other one we've used in the past, but it's not really a monitor. Now CB debugger is a cool tool that we're using on a per request basis for debugging stuff. But for the overall stuff, maybe, maybe they don't do enough of that. But I know a lot of people using their own APM. Like maybe that's the hunger and accustomed were they sort of built into Grafana, using elastic search, and tie into all sorts of interesting things. I wish I knew more about that some of our customers have some pretty cool setups for that. So Oh, but yeah, that's good to see. That is,

Michaela Light 1:00:45
let's look at how people make their servers more secure. So

Gavin Pickin 1:00:52
so the official lockdown guides 56%.

Michaela Light 1:00:56
Now, that's quite a lot of work to go through that I forget how many pages are in that lockdown guide, but it's a lot of steps. Now, fortunately, the Adobe ColdFusion 2021 automate some of that, you know, it'll you know,

Gavin Pickin 1:01:10
there's the secure profile and Adobe CF, right.

Michaela Light 1:01:14
No, there's a well, there is that, but I think they have a done they have some kind of thing, you can say lock down my server.

Gavin Pickin 1:01:24
I thought that was I thought there was this secure profile. Maybe you're right, you know. But yeah, I'll see like the CF configures. What all this is built to try and do that. So when you say apply lockdown settings, it'll basically take those lockdown guides and do all those things for you. And then you can just go and undo the things that you want to relinquish. There's good reasons to not do everything in the guide, you know, but you should follow it until there's a good reason not to. But yeah, I know a lot of people have ops people that handle that. But having those lockdown guides in place has definitely helped a lot. Now, server profiles is new in command box. But if you're in production mode and command box now, that automatically does a lot of the lockdown guide type stuff for you, so that you can't get to the admins and stuff like that. And so when it first came out, a lot of people didn't realize, and then they couldn't get to their local command box admins because they didn't have a development environment set. So it thought they were in production on their local machine. Oh, by the server profiles is pretty interesting. And you can customize that, too. So that's kind of cool.

Michaela Light 1:02:31
But looks like most cofina developers doing something for security. There's only 4% who don't do that. So that's good news.

Gavin Pickin 1:02:42
Yeah, for sure. We have some government customers using CF config type tools where they basically just overlay some settings based on their government requirements. And it's safe, in fact, makes it so much easier. Now it's I couldn't imagine having to go click around 20 servers like the old days.

Michaela Light 1:03:00
Much better. Well, let now let's look at the results of that how many people have been hacked? Most people have not were not hacked in the last two years from a CFA specter 90%. And then cross site scripting, vulnerable app code, SQL injection, zero day issue, just a few things they have not that many over a two year period. So it's still

Gavin Pickin 1:03:27
a decent number considering, you know, only two years and a couple 100 People still. Yeah, a lot of things we can easily you know, resolve the zero day issues, whatever that's it's hard to keep up with, you know, Adobe and Lucia pretty good about keeping up with that, but no SQL params like we should be able to, we should better do something to prevent that. You know, we've got tools to check for a query pram, Vasco, Bing, and you know, other things. So, but yeah, patching can be patching can be a headache. So, yeah, you've

Michaela Light 1:04:04
got to keep on top of it. I mean, you know,

Gavin Pickin 1:04:07
and that's where the HCF tool comes in handy. Right? Well, exactly on your server. So another plug for found Ayios back my SEO,

Michaela Light 1:04:14
it's only $10 a server a month. So if you've got a professional site, there's no excuse not to use it, I feel. Yep. And not only that pizza turns out great alerts about any issue new issues or new patches or zero day issues when they're very few zero day issues. I think it was one every two or three years, which is way smaller than a lot of other languages. Yeah.

Gavin Pickin 1:04:35
They're pretty quick about it. I mean, really, that's one thing. Adobe does step up on security that zero day. That is one thing they do, do really well. They do.

Michaela Light 1:04:46
Let's move over Look who's using AWS lambda or how many people most people aren't using it and don't plan to two thirds of people and then maybe a fifth of people would like to stand it And then there's a few folks, few percent of people who are using lambda. What are your thoughts on that Gammon?

Gavin Pickin 1:05:08
Well, I've used them a little bit just to play with them. But I use the node stuff before we had the fuse lists. And, you know, it was, it was kind of nice. I really haven't played the Lucy's fuse lists from found data yet, I'd like to a lot of is trying to figure out like, okay, when would it be useful? What would I want to use it for? Because a lot of things that I don't want ColdFusion to do, usually, it's something I want to do some big processing. So I'll do it through a few or another. Perseus use a rabbit queue to stack up a bunch of videos, and then I can have it go and persist them somewhere else. So I'm not sure you know, the use for it. But I know Adobe's 2021 Lambda is pretty cool in you. But I haven't tried that either. I'm kind of curious, what's the difference between them? And how they work? But But yeah, it's kind of nice that we have those options now. So I really am. But I haven't played with them. Have you played with the CFL versions?

Michaela Light 1:06:03
No, I haven't, you know, we haven't had a use case, really. So there you go. See if you've got if you're providing a service, like, you know, Pete has that fixed meter service that checks your code for security issues, that all runs through lambda. And I think that's why he created that.

Gavin Pickin 1:06:19
So found some code checker type things, or maybe a CF format type thing, but see, most of the stuff needs to run local to your code is what I'm thinking unless your codes up there already. So yeah, if anyone's got some ideas, let us know. Because I'd like I'd like to play a bit like to see what people are using it for?

Michaela Light 1:06:38
Yeah, I think it's any kind of thing that's not, you know, doesn't have to be time critical. And it's probably doing something right. Like your, your example of videos is potentially a use for it. But

Gavin Pickin 1:06:51
Long live, that's the sort of key. I'm sort of curious. I mean, I'd probably use lambdas in a workflow where you upload the video, and then you transfer it to this bucket. So it could do this, and then the lambda might transfer it to the next one, or, you know, but yeah,

Michaela Light 1:07:05
I just maybe queues are a better way to deal with that, you know?

Gavin Pickin 1:07:08
Yeah. But I mean, if you're doing a whole bunch of emails on AWS lambda might work for that we can spin up 1000 at once. So you know, 1000 emails, you know, maybe that's a good point. I just need to figure out the use case, and then I'll probably be all over it.

Michaela Light 1:07:22
Thank you. All right, I think 44 Yeah, we're now into the wrap up sections is more general. Questions. So we asked questions about why people are using ColdFusion. And let me just look at this. You know, what's, once you doing cold fusion, what's preventing using it? Technology, stack plans, salary, ranges, how people do their work, whether they contract or permanent. And industry people are in. So let's have a look through those in this final section. So what's the top reason people use cough urine?

Gavin Pickin 1:08:09
It's fun to code in. And that was a fun to coding because it's fast to learn? Or is it? Wow. And I don't know. But it's fun. I mean, it's fun, because you can get stuff done. And it's probably fun, because it's fast to learn. So you get stuff done fast when you're learning and that makes it fun.

Michaela Light 1:08:26
And related that, you know, less lines of code to the same thing.

Gavin Pickin 1:08:30
Yep, a lot of times, yeah.

Michaela Light 1:08:34
Now, those are all positive reasons as our runs fast, supportive community, good security, adopt docs. This one is more of a negative reason that they've got a ton of legacy code. And they don't want to have to rewrite in probably wise not to totally rewrite it. Because I've seen customers who've tried to rewrite ColdFusion apps, and it was disaster zone, because they didn't get it completed.

Gavin Pickin 1:09:00
And that's the thing, too, is a lot of people see legacy code as a big negative, you know, it's like existing code. I like that term prior investment. So if you've got all your business logic and ColdFusion, even if it's great code, and you want to switch over the business logic is there and that is a prior investment, you know, you've got a lot of logic and business rules in your code. And yeah, that is a big thing. And it's gonna take time to replicate that. And I know a lot of people that do try those big rewrites, the biggest thing is that the transfer of knowledge, the transfer of business rules, those things are very, very hard to move into a new, yeah, I can build a new site. I can build a new admin, I can build all these new tools, but all those intricacies of that business knowledge, that is the real the big investment, that's the big, you know, cost and that's a big issue when you're trying to rewrite it. And so a lot of times, I think people can keep their business logic very separate from what they're using it for. You know, a lot of times it's easy to translate and move to languages. And so the funny thing is that the reason that we might not be able to migrate away from ColdFusion code is because we're, we don't write it, you know, clean enough. That was cleaner, it'd be easy to get away from. But that's kind of an interesting, you know, thought process. But a lot of times our logic is tied into the processing into the display. It's, it's in there as it's deeply embedded in our code. And so, yeah, it's, it was a big investment.

Michaela Light 1:10:26
And, and then, you know, maybe one of the flavors of ColdFusion is made by a big company, that's obviously not going away, Adobe. So and they've got a roadmap for the next 10 years. Yeah, I mean, they're already, we're already, you know, getting ready to have 2023. Adobe ColdFusion release. So I think that'll come out early next year. I'm hoping,

Gavin Pickin 1:10:49
yep, they're gonna tease it at Thanksgiving time. But yep. And then, obviously, we've got some nice idea choices and plugins, we've got a lot of nice tools to now you know, like autistic person. Hello, we should add that in here. Yeah, because that's the thing a lot of people left back in 2012. I think 2012 2013. Yeah, a lot of people left because other tools had, you know, better VM support, command line tools, other coding tools, and linters and formatters. And, you know, containerization, you know, like, there was just way more support for all of those things.

Michaela Light 1:11:25
Not true anymore. Yeah, that's the

Gavin Pickin 1:11:27
thing is, like, audits made a conscious effort back in, like, 2012 was like, well, Adobe's not gonna put these things out, though, we're gonna build them. And so we built a CLI, we built a configuration management tool, we built a package manager for forge bots, and we built all these tools. And all the things we keep putting out there is to make it easier for us to use but the community in the language and yeah, I think a lot of the reasons people used to leave, we've sort of filled the gaps, right? There's still stuff we could build and improve. But, you know, people left in droves, because there was lacking a lot of things. I think we've solved a lot of those

Michaela Light 1:12:02
problems. They left around Adobe ColdFusion, nine version, that's typically where a chunk of people left. In my conversations with people. Yeah. And the script. I'm forgetting when Adobe took Adobe bought out Macromedia. Do you have you remember when that was? I think that

Gavin Pickin 1:12:20
wasn't seven.

Michaela Light 1:12:22
Okay, so it was a little bit after that. But so there was some shift that happened. I can't quite put my finger on what it was. Yeah,

Gavin Pickin 1:12:29
that was it was not too long after that. And I know everyone was getting mad, they slid throughout everything. And tags to the script syntax was only partially there. They wanted to write scripts. And there was no, you know, a lot of tools were missing, like a lot of other languages for doing some really cool scaffolding and CLI tools and a lot of great stuff. And so again, but the people in the community sort of banded together. And between us, we've covered that, you know, we've got a linter. Now we've got a format, or we've got Boska. Found EO and Pete has done a lot of stuff with security. So yeah, there's a lot of improvements. So I think, like a lot of those reasons people leaving not so valid anymore.

Michaela Light 1:13:10
No, they are, they are not though I did make a note just now to see if I can reach the people who did leave to find out if they remember why they left.

Gavin Pickin 1:13:19
Yeah, I mean, like how hims wrote a pretty big scaping post about it, but I mean, did he? Oh, yeah, he wrote a pretty big one. But he came back for a while they left again. But yeah, it's

Michaela Light 1:13:31
an interesting guy, how helps

Gavin Pickin 1:13:35
a lot of people let's let's

Michaela Light 1:13:37
look at what's preventing people from embracing ColdFusion or their company. So most people said nothing is preventing them. But the top other reason behind that is hard to find ColdFusion developers,

Gavin Pickin 1:13:51
these are the big negatives for sure. People are complaining about having to find he had to find CF developers, there's also a lot of people saying it's hard to find good cohesion jobs. So I'm wondering if the people were looking for developers at modern, because, you know, no one wants to go work in a cruddy old system that aren't using tools, like if you're going to do develop, you want to work for someone who's using modern tools, and, you know, good code base or plans to make a good code base. You know, you want to you want to, you want to have a company where people want to work. And so it might be easier. But there are developers that are looking, but it is harder to find experienced developers with that expertise, but there are new ones coming through and you can train them and that's what we're having to do for a lot of things. And that kind of happens in most languages. You don't get experts coming in. A lot of times you got to train, train them because you don't want to pay the experts. So

Michaela Light 1:14:44
and then a second issue is cost and licensing issues. I know there's been a lot of debate about how the licensing current Adobe licensing is, you know, confusing and can be expensive. And there

Gavin Pickin 1:14:58
was another big thing coming out CF Summit. They're changing the policies to be more container and flexible licensing good. So I think that's a big one because for the last three years since Docker came out, Adobe didn't know. We didn't know

Michaela Light 1:15:13
Docker came out Docker came out. Oh, six. Yeah, long term.

Gavin Pickin 1:15:18
But the last three years, we've been asking Toby Okay, well, does enterprise license cover one server? One instance? One? Like, is it per core? Because it was pretty cool. And we, you know, like,

Michaela Light 1:15:31
it was very confused. So I'm very happy that they've streamlined that. I did bring that up with waiter lobby community, Matt. Yeah, Mark. I didn't know whether I should say his name or not. Because he got he got some heat for that episode. Yeah, the back end. I mean, but it was, it was telling the truth. I'm just passing on what people tell me.

Gavin Pickin 1:15:53
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's been tough because people, people don't know. And basically, they had to sit down to find out what the licensing was. Because it's tough. I mean, yeah, if you have, if you have a VM, which has 12 cores, but you're only using two of them on your Docker image, should you pay for 12? Or should you pay for two? And if you spin it up for for you No, two weeks at Christmas? to double it? Do you need to go buy more licenses? Or should it be flexible? You know, like, it's right there. We're very much old school, you install a server, you buy a license, but today is not working that way. And they're never embracing that. And that's great. Well, that's

Michaela Light 1:16:25
good. That's good news. So maybe this will go down next year. And then other reasons causing people issues, lack of marketing, or press around ColdFusion.

Gavin Pickin 1:16:34
Only 20% said that, which I'm surprised because I think that that's probably 80% of the people. Because that's really not. That's why management doesn't like it either.

Michaela Light 1:16:43
Well, that may be true, these may be related. And then this is the flip side of hard to find developers, it's hard to find CF work. And issues with legacy code. Well, that's true. whatever language you write in, guys, sorry, to disillusion you. There's legacy code, and pretty much every language, and then various other smaller issues around bugs or clients don't like confusion, which is probably related to the management, you know, marketing. Id documentation, Cloud Support, tech support security issue. Very few people think security is an issue. I think that yeah, I think that's a false perception. I really, you know, having studied the security of other languages, there are a lot worse.

Gavin Pickin 1:17:31
Yeah, they are a few mirrors. A lot of ones there to be honest. Yep. I think you're right. But yeah, it's, it's interesting, but most of them come around to people leaving the language because clients won't let them use it. The management doesn't like them, because everybody thinks is did so that

Michaela Light 1:17:49
there's no and that's why that's why people who evangelize it like Mark takana, or yourself or Brad or Luis or me, or Charlie or Ben. You know, I think that is an important. I mean, I know we don't we're not as big as Adobe, by any, any anywhere close. But it's a kind of, you know, grassroots thing and people listening can help you just blog about it, or poke tweet about it or someone else's, yep. Right, then it all helps create a difference there. And also coming back to those communities. If you write on a community, that's Google wall, like Stack Exchange, or the oldest one or whatever, then it becomes visible that people are using it, you know. So I think everyone listening can do something to help.

Gavin Pickin 1:18:40
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be number one. But, you know, there's a lot of languages out there, Ruby's getting the whole Ruby's did thing too. And I'm like, Finally, someone else can suffer the same spirit we are. But

Michaela Light 1:18:49
most languages that are more than three years old, have the language is dying. Thing is something that programmers seem to enjoy kind of being negative towards the language or creating fear or something, I put my finger on where this comes from. I've looked into language, you know, PHP is dying, or Ruby is dying, or whatever. And it typically starts just a few years after the language has come out, which is totally effing ridiculous.

Gavin Pickin 1:19:19
Yeah. So starting to get some maturity and following, you know, right. But, yeah,

Michaela Light 1:19:24
I mean, it would be like with humans, like you've just got a toddler has learned to walk and now you're saying they're dying. You know, I don't think that's a helpful and productive thing to be doing, guys. For sure. Anyway, let's move on to something less morbid. Let's have a look at company's plans for their technology stack. So,

Gavin Pickin 1:19:43
so far, the results are using Adobe and they have no plans to migrate. 38% are using Lucy and have no plans to migrate 23 just migrating from CFML to another language that's almost a quarter of the people are migrating away from the language now. There's 2% that are migrating from another language to ColdFusion. But there's a few people that are moving. Oops, did I do something? Yeah, for you drag. The interesting one is, we've got 18% of people are moving from Adobe to Lucy, probably for licensing. But we have point 7% moving from Lucy back to Adobe. And I actually have talked to a few people moving back to Adobe, because they need that support, they need to be able to get someone they pay for the support, they need someone to jump on something. And you know, W gets a lot of slack for a lot of things. But if you're a paid support customer, they will roll out a hotfix they will roll out things, something is broken, they do support you now, will they add a feature that you want? That's not always gonna happen? When they fix something to work the way you think it should? That's not always gonna happen. But if there's something broken, you know, they're they're pretty good about rolling it out. And some people responded,

Michaela Light 1:21:00
loose, Adobe have a much bigger engineering team than Lucy, you know, I don't know quite how many engineer because obviously, Lucy is open source. So you know, there are some people who kind of work for the Lucy foundation. But then the

Gavin Pickin 1:21:12
volunteer. Yeah, there any part time?

Michaela Light 1:21:16
Yeah, as well. So, you know, I want to say there's at least 30 engineers working on Adobe ColdFusion. And they churn out fixes and features every two years. Apart from the COVID year, they publish a new release, you know,

Gavin Pickin 1:21:33
they probably only released 2020 in 2021. Because they didn't want to have the name 2020 on it, because of all the bad juju with COVID and 2020. Like that. I'm not naming it that.

Michaela Light 1:21:43
No, that was exactly why they did that, in my opinion. So and you know, I did there, everyone's engineering team took a hit during COVID. Because people working from home. And, you know, if you're used to working together in an office, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed. I mean, we've been doing it a terror attack for you know, 12 years now. And you guys been doing it since you started I want to say to

Gavin Pickin 1:22:08
newer, yeah, pretty much now, but a lot of people weren't? Yeah, so out of this question. I don't know if we can ask a follow up next time for the people that are moving to another language. I wonder what language they're moving to?

Michaela Light 1:22:21
We did have that data. Let me see if I can I find that for you. I was prepared.

Gavin Pickin 1:22:28
So because that's something I'm interested in.

Michaela Light 1:22:31
So we had he said, if you're moving from CFL to another language, what language are you going to? So unfortunately, it's not statistically whatever. But

Gavin Pickin 1:22:40
he taught me node Python, Spring Boot profile.

Michaela Light 1:22:45
ASP. So all the other usual suspects, I would say,

Gavin Pickin 1:22:49
but it's just kind of interesting to see the mix. So yeah, and there's four

Michaela Light 1:22:53
pages there. So you can I mean, I guess we could add like, maybe we can get Brad to handle. Round one really, isn't it?

Gavin Pickin 1:23:02
Yeah. See, I know a lot of people are moving to other sort of other things where they're moving to Laravel. Because Laravel is a big framework with a lot of tools for PHP, so they're not moving to PHP, because it's PHP, they're moving to an established solid framework, like Laravel people are moving to Java necessarily. You see them, they say, I'm moving to spring boots. Yeah, because Spring Boot is a great framework on Java, C. Java. Yeah,

Michaela Light 1:23:33
I'm not seeing any patterns in this, I would say just take, take all the other web development languages, they all get a share of where people are going. And to be honest, in my experience, this is not a technical decision. It's not because ColdFusion doesn't run fast, not because it's not secure. It's not you know, it's all it is security is reliable, it does run fast is fast. Brookman is typically a political decision made at a high level in the organization, people don't even know what's going on. Yeah, the CEOs, you know, husband was at a cocktail party, and they heard Java was hot, you know, or was the new CTO came in, and they, they just love Ruby on Rails, and that's what we're gonna get everything covered

Gavin Pickin 1:24:16
are JetBrains is behind Kotlin. And they're pumping millions of dollars into marketing. Or there's another one, that Red Hat just started, I don't even remember the name of it. But if you look at Dev Nexus, they have half the sessions were on that language because they basically sponsored the conference and that's what it's doing.

Michaela Light 1:24:32
Let's look at money, what salary are people making money? So the mean, looks like the the median, the most popular salary is about 105 214k a year. But you know, plenty of people 75k or 95k. And then you know, it, there are still people who it depends where you live, right? If you live in the Bay Area, so it's gonna make a lot got more money just to get a non such big house,

Gavin Pickin 1:25:03
we might need to throw that in next year have your US dollars, but maybe we can have a website link that takes them to the, you know, your salary by geographic region, put your salary in here and figure out what it's worth. Because yeah, someone in someone in Peru, for example, making 50k us might be like your living rich, you know,

Michaela Light 1:25:23
absolutely very rich. I mean, wonderful average salary here, I want to say is $1,000 a month, which is $250. So program is obviously make more than the average salary. Yeah, you know, this might be a factory worker or something. But

Gavin Pickin 1:25:38
yeah, that's what a lot of people move to different countries once they get the remote status. And they can do that. I mean, they can make a lot more money. Absolutely, as well as Thailand and South America when they're getting started, because they can live on the cheap and build up the company. And yeah, oh, yeah.

Michaela Light 1:25:54
If anyone here is remote and hasn't tried living in other places, definitely worth trying. And you can move or you know, you don't have to stay at CES stuck in one place. You can try different places. See what you like,

Gavin Pickin 1:26:06
timezone friendly, because I know that time zones obviously can make it tough.

Michaela Light 1:26:10
Thailand is not timezone friendly. The United States in this sort of okay with your

Gavin Pickin 1:26:16
I worked remotely in New Zealand a little bit when I go on vacation, I'll stay a little longer, but suddenly three hours off in the air. Yeah, three hours off Pacific in the winter and five in the summer. So

Michaela Light 1:26:28
yeah, so that means that that means it's six hours off Eastern and eight as the other end.

Gavin Pickin 1:26:34
Yeah. So I worked on a team, remote Indian team for a while. So I was getting up at 5am and UPS and then I would have y pm stand ups when they go wow, at the other end. Yeah. To stand ups a day. Because each team would have to like to hand off. Once the

Michaela Light 1:26:49
global teams, I did an interview with someone about global teams, it's quite a challenge to to be able to do that. But there's definitely you know, anyone listening who can work remote if you haven't tried even just within the United States, you can you know, Brad lives in Kansas. That's me, I think,

Gavin Pickin 1:27:08
yep. The audit team has a big spread we had Bill used to live in, in Hawaii. And then we got the El Salvadorian. Team. Luis now lives in Malaga, Spain. He's live in Texas. But we've got Grand Rapids, Michigan, we've got Chicago, we've got Kansas.

Michaela Light 1:27:26
But my point, the point I was trying to make is if you don't have to be in a big city, like Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York City, or Washington, DC, you can have a better in my opinion, a better quality of life. And you know, your money goes two or three times further in Kansas than it does in San Francisco.

Gavin Pickin 1:27:45
Oh, yeah. So that's, that's a different power ratio. And

Michaela Light 1:27:49
and then I have talked to some CF developers don't even have a house. They they have a mobile. What do you call them an RV? You know, they have the satellite internet, and then I'll be and I'm forgetting the guy's name. But there's quite a famous CFO who was doing that for a while.

Gavin Pickin 1:28:05
Yeah, if I could get a slightly better internet. When I was on the travel, I'd be doing that more when I go on vacation. There's like certain parts of South Dakota where it's a black hole, the Black Hills or a black hole? Just South Dakota. Okay. The but yeah, I mean, we go RVing. And I'll use my, my phone together or the satellite. And but yeah, I need to get a better one. If I'm gonna go full time, that's for sure. But it's, you can definitely do it. Remote stuff is great. I think it's, it's really good. And COVID Let people see that.

Michaela Light 1:28:32
And yes. And that we've got the question, what's your current arrangement? And remote was a third of the people answering. So we'll see if that continues next year. Because, you know, some companies try and get people to go back to the office. But

Gavin Pickin 1:28:45
yeah, so. So 34% remote versus 41. In house, we got almost 50% of the people are salaried where we've got some contract and some self employed. But 25% of people running contracts still. That's interesting. And then a few unemployed a couple of students. So yeah, so basically,

Michaela Light 1:29:08
we need more students.

Gavin Pickin 1:29:10
Yes, we do. We definitely.

Michaela Light 1:29:13
But yes, yeah. But

Gavin Pickin 1:29:15
business, but yeah, the salary. That's pretty good. I mean, the thing is with contracts, I'm wondering if that's because they only need help when they need it. Or, you know, they try to sort of self employed contract. It's interesting, though, that

Michaela Light 1:29:29
I don't know that developers. Yeah, contract to me implies they've got like a permanent position somewhere, but they're not an employee. They're done through a contract agency. Okay. So yeah. And then self employed mean, probably means they got their own business and they've got several clients contract. Typically, they just have one client.

Gavin Pickin 1:29:48
Yeah. I used to do a lot of, I guess I was self employed when I did more contracting stuff, but yeah, yep. That's a good mix. So it is

Michaela Light 1:29:59
this local industry These people are in what's the top industry? I'm not surprised. Yeah, but reveal it to our listeners

Gavin Pickin 1:30:05
and Information Technology at 42%. But education, health care, government and corporate on 1713 and 11%. Little financial, little wholesale, interesting. Manufacturing and transports only four and 3%. Telecoms and agriculture down the ones, and then mining and natural resources, half a percent. But I think that makes make sense for a lot of it. But

Michaela Light 1:30:33
and then I don't know what we're missing in the other category. I'll have to we'll have to scan a thing results. Yeah. each other. Yeah, well, we'll investigate that. Because every year when we do the server, we look at what people write in in the other category and see, is this something that's really big that should have been listed? So we have our first year with this question? Because it is interesting to see what where people work. So that is the final question with checkboxes. And then there is a

Gavin Pickin 1:31:08
one additional comments, right.

Michaela Light 1:31:11
Additional comments. So let me bring out the different comments, see if anything stands out to you? What kinds of things being said here?

Gavin Pickin 1:31:21
Oh, someone thinks see if got snobby. Sorry, guys.

Michaela Light 1:31:26
That's not my impression, but I can understand sometimes people can be snappy. And I think he's got, I will say, I've noticed I've been doing I do LinkedIn posts twice a week. And normally, either no one comments, or I get a few, you know, interesting comments. But in the last month, I've had people come up with all kinds of crazy on all kinds of had two people. One person said, Well, there's no point talking about cold fusion, because it's going to be a nuclear war, and everyone will be dead. Okay, well, I hope not. But you know, and then someone else was, is like, I don't know what was going on for them. But they seem to be big. I think people are under a lot of mental stress is the point I wanted to make. So yeah, and I just talked about this on the show, and I've written about it and you know, if you're feeling stressed, get some help. Support?

Gavin Pickin 1:32:16
For sure. It's something we shouldn't mess around with. But, yeah, there's a lot of stuff, I think people should go check out the survey results online and go look through them and read some of the comments. Obviously, we tried to give a summary of the numbers in the stats. And if you guys are watching the videos, you get to see all the pretty graphs as well. But yeah, the other thing, too, is some of the questions in here. Like, obviously, we're using ColdFusion, I'd like to see more of why people aren't using cold fusion, you know, from those who aren't using it, you know, and I believe that's

Michaela Light 1:32:49
a good point, we should maybe do a survey of people who either don't have never used it and don't even know what it is, or know what it is, but don't really understand it, or the people who left, there's the two interesting demographics. The question is, how do you reach them?

Gavin Pickin 1:33:04
You know, Yep, that was tough. But I'm wondering if it's those types of things. Like, you know, I know, you used to be involved with cfunited. I'm wondering if you have access to some of the emails, maybe some of them are still around, email them, I would love for you guys to fill out a survey, you know, we're curious who's still using CF who moved on? And, you know, and if so, why? And where to and, you know, Brian, just, we're just sort of curious. I mean, and like, I know, the CF objective conference, see, I can probably have some to and we get contacts, people from Scotch on the rocks, I run some of those old conference people, because they would have had attendee lists. And, like, reach out, because I know a lot of people that aren't doing cold fusion now. And on the working code podcast that we're talking about, it's like, it'd be really great just to hang out, have a bunch of people used to go to all these conferences that you haven't seen in forever, because it moved on, you know, so we can help you.

Michaela Light 1:33:55
I think that's a great idea. You know, you have to mold they have to be motivated to want to fill it in. Right? That's the problem with surveys, you get, I can't think what the right phrase is, but the people who fill in a survey, a self selecting,

Gavin Pickin 1:34:12
the motivation needs to be there. But, you know, maybe you say is like, look, a lot of people are asking us, you know, if, you know, should they stay or confusion, or should they move on? We'd like to see your thoughts. You know, have you moved on? Where have you gone? And how to treat? Yes. And if your stance, why do you stay and why is greater Yeah, because then people who have left can say, I left because of this, and I'm really happy. And this is why. And, you know, so it gives them a reason, because they you know, a lot of people like to share the good experiences or the bad or they can complain about ColdFusion a little more, you know, let them but I think we'll learn about it, you know, yeah. Adrian Marino in the working code, this code was talking about how he lifts ColdFusion several years ago and, you know, did a lot of migration work to JavaScript and stuff, but he's like, If he jumped up, I mean, he basically doubled his salary in a few years going to JavaScript over ColdFusion. Because more options, more expertise available and more. A lot of things. Yes. Like, a lot of people are doing that, but we don't hear from them because they left. So maybe it's a good way to say, you know, that we're trying to find out for those people. Yeah, why?

Michaela Light 1:35:23
I can. I can certainly try it with the email list, we have see if we get anyone to answer that. And in addition, you know, maybe on social media or Twitter, it's possible to reach that. And then the other idea that comes to me is find someone an influencer for another language and see if they, they would be prepared to push out that because obviously, their people are following whatever language they're into. Or maybe their language neutral. Like some of the darker folks, right? They don't care what language you use.

Gavin Pickin 1:35:55
Yeah. I mean, I think like Ray, Kansas still has a reach for a lot of people that follow Him for everything, but they used to do cold fusion. So maybe Ray would help us and just say, Hey, we're just want to ping a few people and figure out, you know, if you've ever use cold fusion seriously, and you're in your left hand, give us some some feedback on why you left, where you left to, and you know, what you think of your decision. And, you know, why? Why do you

Michaela Light 1:36:20
think is a great idea? Let's see if we make that happen. And we might get some interesting ideas might get some discussion going?

Gavin Pickin 1:36:28
Because yeah, if someone says, Hey, I want to hear and this is, this is great. And this is great. And that's great. When we can like, Okay, well, what can we do to make CF better? And that's what we keep asking ourselves, right? How can we keep CFX alive? So if there's something that someone else is doing somewhere else we can try to, you know, incorporate that, you know, we're

Michaela Light 1:36:45
I mean, it's important, it's a, it's a, it's a little analogous to a break up conversation, you know, some people who break up with their girlfriend or wife or husband or boyfriend will have a conversation to understand how could they improve in the future? Now, the issue there is, sometimes it's how can I get you back? And it turns into an icky conversation. Yeah. And you've got to be kind of emotionally mature enough to be able to have that conversation. And to be open to it. Same thing with language choices is often quite religious or coat, like, on all sides. I mean, I think ColdFusion has a bit of a cult thing going on. I think it's a good coat.

Gavin Pickin 1:37:24
I mean, it's okay to be proud of the language use and the fact that you're, you're good at it, because you've used it for so long. There's a lot of pride in that. And that's okay. Yeah. And I'm okay talking to people. And so you know, up, there are some good things about other languages. And I'd like to know, whether I choose to leave or not, I still would like to know, and, you know, yeah, Laravel framework does some cool stuff. And guess what, the really cool stuff we built into coldbox. We built these modules like quick and qB, which are based on things that someone else has done. We've improved them where we thought they needed improving. But you know, there's no reason we can't incorporate stuff that everybody, everybody. Yeah,

Michaela Light 1:37:58
yeah, but other languages and ecosystems can learn from what the cool things have been done in ColdFusion. And they do. That's the thing. And sometimes, there are some things, you know, some languages are good at certain things, you know, they're not so good at other things. And it's okay to use one language for one things and another language for someone else.

Gavin Pickin 1:38:16
Yep. And that's the thing is, I think using glue and rabbit cues and having other things do things that ColdFusion doesn't do well is a perfect way to do that, you know, you keep all your business logic and ColdFusion. And like the perfect person talked about this is Brian class. And what he does with the John Hopkins University ColdFusion is the glue that brings all that together, but they do amazing things with AWS and, and queues and workflows. But cold fusion is the core of truth. But it uses all those other tools to do things that cold fusion is not good at. And his small team does amazing things with cold fusion, because it utilizes tools for the right job, use the right tool for the right job. But it doesn't need to rewrite cold fusion to do it. So

Michaela Light 1:38:56
and I'll give you the give you a kind of strange example that, you know, SQL databases, do database manipulation way better than cold fusion Ruby, or any other language will do with flat files, they're just built for that role. And this is kind of pointless, in 99% of the time, it'd be stupid to write your own database handling stuff in some other language. Because there exists this and we don't get upset about that. So why, you know, same thing for these other things.

Gavin Pickin 1:39:26
Exactly. So after database, like a video processor tools, and then also an audio processor to you know, there you go. So,

Michaela Light 1:39:35
if people want to find you online, Gavin, what are the best ways to do

Gavin Pickin 1:39:39
that? Well on Twitter, I am G PyCon P IC k i n. I tweet about most things I do. So from there, I'll link to things like Twitter. I'll link to the CFML news podcast. I'll link to the webinars I do for orders on a meet ups that I might do as well. But yeah, we've got a lot of cool things going on audits. We have a I don't do webinars quite often, but we have a new Software Craftsmanship book club that we're starting up we've got a new artist office hours we're starting is a coding with a kiwi so you can come watch me in some community members, you know sort of life hacks and some code together and talk about it and discuss it with the group. So but auto solutions is the key place to go for most of that and Twitter's where I'll advertise it. So go to Twitter G pickin dot, G PyCon. And you'll see lots of tweets from me about ColdFusion and everything around it.

Michaela Light 1:40:32
Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about the ColdFusion user survey.

Gavin Pickin 1:40:37
No problem. Thank you so much. And thanks for doing the survey. It's really great and I can't wait for the trends episode so we can see what happened over all these years. Excellent.