ColdFusion's Heartbeat
Posted by
Brad Wood
Jan 23, 2010 08:50:00 UTC
I jogged down the stairs, one arm over my head, as I pulled my coat on a sleeve at a time. Fishing the car keys out of my pocket with one hand, I leaned over my computer to tap in my E-mail password with the other. "Wow, 41 unread messages in the CF-Talk folder," I thought. "There must be a hot new topic on the list today." With a click I watched the new thread flow in.
"Why i fear ColdFusion is on its last legs"
"Oh Geez," I sighed, "Please not with this again!" There wasn't time to read all that right then. I'd have to catch up on this one later in the day when my absorption rate was higher.As much as I wanted to reply to a couple of the posts, I didn't let myself. I have a few simple rules I follow on the Talk list:
- Stay away from flame wars
- Avoid threads started by Don Li
- Don't be part of any discussion with a very high likelihood of being moved to CF-Community
"If you want change - then its time to step up and do something about it. Get involved in your local UGM, start presenting to people, go to local techups, or non-CF conventions or twitter meets. There are SO many avenues out there for instigating change its ridiculous. "
Mark Mandel
"You know who's in a position to DO SOMETHING? It's you, not Adobe. You're not satisfied with how Adobe markets their product? Market your services with that product! You're not satisfied with their presence in user groups and conferences? Get in those user groups and conferences yourself! It's developers, not salesmen, who are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a programming product. "
Dave Watts
"This is why I get frustrated with some CFers who bemoan the lack of corporate marketing: all of the "competing technologies" have no corporate marketing - it's all about developer community. ... The point is that PHP, Ruby/Rails, etc - all the 'hot' techs that are free and open source - those are promoted by their communities."Feel free to take a moment and re-read those again. They're kind of sobering-- a call-out really to everyone who truly cares about ColdFusion to do their part. But most of all, those quotes really resonate with why I do what I do. I participate in CF-Talk, ColdBox, my Coder's Revolution blog, KCDEVCORE, and if I ever get my lazy butt out of gear, I've promised Charlie Arehart a cfmeetup preso. I feel a little guilty though, seeing as how this is my first blog post this month. I actually have a running list of all the things I want to blog about when I get the time and it depresses me how long some of those items have been on my list. Is it enough? Do I owe the community more? I wish I had a silver bullet to engage and energize every ColdFusion programmer out there but the only thing I can directly control is my own involvement. It's a tall order, but the collective organism that is every involved person is what will continue to keep ColdFusion going. I don't think ColdFusion is on its last legs. Jeremy Allaire may have breathed life into Cold Fusion, but we are its heartbeat now. As long as we keep pumping I think its legs will carry it for a long long time.
Sean Corfield
Lola LB
Good post. I'm not subscribed to CF-Talk and only read it online, every once in a while, but this caught my attention. I don't know what else more can we do to promote ColdFusion. I think the real issue is that decision makers (those with a hand on the purse string) are making the decision to move away from ColdFusion, sometimes based on faulty information. And there needs to be a way to get through to the decision makers and persuade them to give CF a second chance.
Brad Wood
@Lola: I think the main prevailing theory here is that developers and CxO's alike respond to a product with an externally visible social "buzz" around it. The kind of buzz created by hard core developers talking to their friends, conferences, active user groups, and community activity in general. I think heightening this buzz, or increasing CF's "heartbeat" IS our engagement strategy.
Lola LB
Would it help if more sites were able to put up some type of "Powered by ColdFusion" logo? Or would that be a bit too gauche?
Brad Wood
I've thought about that before, but I"m not sure how much good it would do. It's hard to tell where a lot of people like CIO's tend to form their opinions. I think a lot of it might be in the tech magazines and websites they read. MS can get ads in all those places simply with very large amounts of money. I can only assume Adobe has PR people who suggest articles and topics to such publications.
Grant Copley
They are absolutely right that it is up to us, the developers, to continue talking about and pushing ColdFusion. I don't think it's all on Adobe's shoulders. I admit I have been frustrated myself with trying to find a sense of community in the CF world, especially meeting others in person. I also admit that I haven't done my part like I should.
Let's take the Nashville, TN ColdFusion User Group here in the US. I'm not meaning to pick on them or the person running the group, but this is the ColdFusion group where I live. Last meeting posted was for 06/18/2009. http://www.ncfug.com/go/meetings/ This is not the kind of activity that is encouraging for people in our area to take a look at ColdFusion. Ultimately ColdFusion's future is up to us. Considering the competition with other technologies that are out there now, I think we have a lot of work ahead of us, myself included.
Aaron West
@Everyone - I agree with Sean, Mark, and Dave, that continuing to push ColdFusion into the future is in large part up to the community of developers. I believe Adobe is doing a good job with their part of the responsibility, but much of that responsibility lies on our shoulders as developers, managers, Adobe Community Professionals, etc.
@Grant - Hey Grant, I manage (or try to) the Nashville CF User group. You are absolutely correct that we are (read, me specifically) falling down on the job with keeping an active schedule for the group. I don't have a huge excuse for the lack of meetings other than my the norm "life and work are taking all my time." Honestly, I've been meaning to turn the group over to someone else for some time. J.J. Merrick has been functioning as the group co-manager for over a year now and he and I will be figuring out where to take things next. Hopefully this will happen soon.
I do encourage you to get involved and I'll be honest and say I've never heard your name or had the pleasure to meet you in person at a group event. If you take the last 7 months out of the equation, NCFUG has been a VERY active group. That said, if you have an idea for a meeting topic, or you want to present yourself, please let me (trajik210 AT gmail DOT com) or J.J. ((jay AT cyber-jay DOT com) know and we'll arrange it.
Grant Copley
@Aaron - thanks for your response here. I would love to get involved and meet other CFers here locally. I'm emailing you guys my info.
Justin Carter
I think most people are missing the point of Mike's original post - he is saying that there are practically no CF jobs in Sydney (Australia) at the moment and he is wondering why, and what Adobe are planning (or not planning) to do to help promote CF in Australia.
The USA is a safe market for ColdFusion. Unfortunately for him (and me, and many others) Australia is not...
Brad Wood
The purpose of Mike's original post was not lost on me. This blog entry was really my personal take-away from it.
Mike probably has some very good reasons to think he is getting the short end of an Adobe stick, but unfortunately not many of us have any power over where Adobe spends their marketing money. For this post I chose to use talking-points from Mike's thread focus on the things I do have control over, starting with me and my involvement.
Justin Carter
@Brad: Yeah and I think your personal reflection is good - motivating even :) It's just that Dave and Sean's posts, while ordinarily being great pieces of advice, are in fact missing the point when taken in the original context of the thread. I don't want to take your blog post off track, I just wanted to point that out incase others have missed it (as it seems many in the CF-Talk thread have). Since I'm moving back to Australia later in the year I'm watching the CF job market there with interest!