Author: tpryan

I’m a little late to the party but I got word yesterday that I was selected as an Adobe Community Expert for ColdFusion. I’m a little humbled by the company in just this last round of Community Experts, let alone the whole group.

I’m sure it will be a bit before my information is up on the site, but I just couldn’t contain my excitement.

Once I get the hang of this whole “being a dad thing” I’ll be posting ColdFusion content regularly again.

Thanks for letting me in, Adobe.

Avish Parashar, a friend of mine, is starting a new business venture. It’s a consulting and training company which is directed at teaching technical people non-technical skills. You know, those elusive “soft skills” you hear about from time to time.

I recommend Avish and his training in the strongest terms possible. I’ve worked with him in this capacity for eight years getting guidance on courage, creativity, communication, and influence along the way. I have definitely enjoyed the fruits of applying his philosophy and techniques to my regular working life.

Anyway, check out his site, simpleITSuccess.com, and if you are even considering it, drop him a line. You won’t regret it.

Less than a year ago, I went to cf.Objective for the first time, and came back with a list of items that I wanted to see myself do, because I was introduced to them at the conference. I thought I would do a quick public coming clean about my progress.

To recap, my list was:

• Start using Coldspring
• Start using an ORM
  • Transfer
  • Reactor
  • A refined version of Squidhead
• Start using a real (UI) framework
  • Fusebox
  • Mach II
  • ModelGlue
• Stop thinking about objects in terms of data
• Start doing development on my local machine
• Stop spreading rumors that the man saying he is Sean Corfield having the real Sean Corfield tied up in his hotel room.

My progress:

I started using ColdSpring for dependency injection in a few of my projects. I haven’t reached by goal of using it for Aspect Oriented Programming yet. So that will go back on the list.

I refined Squidhead to work against multiple DBMS’s and to understand foreign keys; making is a real solution for at least me.

I failed to start using a real UI framework. I would still like to, but I’ve been lazy. I need to be more disciplined. I really want to start using either Fusebox or ModelGlue.

I think I’ve switching from thinking about objects as objects first, and then going into the database to represent them, not the other way around. Could I do better? Sure. But I am much further ahead of myself a year ago.

I switched to local development solely. No more remote servers. Feels great, I never want to go back. Thank you, Mark Drew, your “car with a spike on the steering wheel” analogy changed my professional life.

I don’t spread rumors about Sean’s identity anymore. In part, Sean finally updated his picture. In part because I heard if you make any sort of fun of him, he will track you down, and shave a half dollar sized bald spot onto your head. That man is dedicated! And a Philadelphia winter is much, much colder with a mini-tonsure. Trust me.

So that’s it. I’ll hold off on making a new list until after cf.Objective 2008.

And if you aren’t going, don’t worry, every ColdFusion blog will be full of stories of how awesome it is. So, you know, that will be just like being there.

There is a very interesting article over at Knowledge@Wharton about Market Share vs Profitability.

I skimmed it a few months back when it came out but never thought about it in terms of the ColdFusion community until I saw this link at Daring Fireball applying this phenomenon to Apple.

Basically the gist I get from it is that profitability is more conducive to long term health of a company than market share. It’s not proven, but if it is true it puts the ColdFusion market into a particular light. If what is true for companies is true for products, it might not matter to ColdFusion’s long term health if it steals market share from ASP.NET or PHP. ColdFusion’s long term health might be in its profitability, which according to Adobe has been very good.

Market share is still important to us, as it helps determines availability of work. But this phenomenon might a good explanation for why what we see Adobe doing with ColdFusion doesn’t always match up with what the community wishes it would do.

I got word tonight that I will be speaking at cf.Objective() 2008. Needless to say I am thrilled, excited, and a little intimidated. Cf.Objective, in my experience, has the most advanced content of any of the various ColdFusion world events. It’s a lot to live up to, and almost everyone there blogs, so if you screw up big it’s not like you can keep it under the radar.

My topic is “Selling Professional Development Techniques at a Hostile Shop.”

Here’s the abstract:

You’ve started using Subversion, you’ve drunk the frameworks Kool-Aid, and you go so far as to use an Ant script to launch CfEclipse. There’s only one problem, your co-workers don’t want to join you. Worse still, your boss doesn’t see the big deal, and upper management starts an anti-framework club. You don’t want to leave but you can’t fathom staying at a workplace that doesn’t embrace progress. What do you do?

You leave the technical behind, dust off those so called soft skills, and turn to politics to get the job done.

This session will help you to identify all of the players on the opposing team, figure out their issues, determine what techniques to use to change their minds, and avoid turning into Machiavelli in the process. By the end of the session, you should have a set of concrete tactics and strategies to go back to your organization and start converting the masses.

The basic gist of the session revolves around the question: What do you do when your co-workers or management reject your efforts to introduce “professional development techniques?” What are “professional development techniques?” For the purposes of this talk they include (but are not limited to):

• Frameworks
• Version Control
• Code Reviews
• Unit Testing
• Company specific Best Practices
• Automation
• Code Generation

It’s a question I’ve found myself asking from time to time over the past few years. I’ve had to make find my own answers for it. My hope is to help make it easier for others.

Obviously this isn’t a technical presentation, but I hope to keep it practical instead of theoretical by providing concrete tactics and strategies to employ.

I have the outline mostly ready at this point, but if anyone has any specific problems or scenarios they would like advice on, please feel free to drop me a line either in the comments or through my contact form.

I’ve been a little busy with the newest addition to my family, but I wanted to drop a line about an upcoming conference appearance.

I’ll be speaking at a session at WebManiacs 2008 on AIR and SQLite. My session is on the first day of the conference, which runs from Monday May 19^th until Friday the 23^rd. It’s shaping up to be a great conference, and I’m a bit humbled by some of the other names that will be appearing. I don’t know how I got on the speaker’s list, but however it happened; I’m very excited about it.