CFConversations - an Adobe ColdFusion and CFML podcast - Interview Episodes

CFConversations 45, Interview 30: Sean Schroeder, Matt Levine & Chris Peterson

Sun, 02 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I told you we're back, didn't I??? :-) This is the second of three episodes recorded at CFObjective 2010. This is a mobile interview, with Matt Levine and Sean Schroeder of Blue River Interactive (creators of Mura CMS). We mostly talk about the new Mura version 5.2. Later, we talk about the conference. Near the end of the interview, Chris Peterson of Alagad, whose session Matt and I just attended on the Amazon cloud, joins in and we continue to talk about sessions we attended. This episode was recorded with a Flip Video camera, which has a surprisingly good microphone (sorry, no video). It was recorded in the vendor area on the morning of Day 3 (Saturday, April 24th). That's why you'll hear kids, people and a few unknown sounds during the recording. :) However, the quality of the sound is pretty good on this one, better than the next episode we have coming out next. This was the last episode I recorded. I had hoped to record one or two more at lunch, but my shuttle left earlier than expected, and I had to leave suddenly to make it (which I did, somehow). The next episode was recorded on Day 1, but will take some more time to clean up. Run time: 21:53

CFConversations 43, Interview 29 - Matt Pressnall & HTML Formatter (which formats CFML)

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:12:00 -0400

It's been a longer than expected hiatus (yeah, I know you've heard that before), but we're bring something you've probably not heard about for the first CFConversations episode of 2010. If you're using the ColdFusion Builder beta, you may have noticed that there's something missing that may have been a part of your old IDE: There's no code formatter. Dreamweaver has its own code formatting features, and HomeSite+/ColdFusion Studio has Codesweeper. For CFBuilder, though, that functionality's not there. Now someone may build a ColdFusion Builder extension, but I've found another option. Searching around the net for an Eclipse plugin to format code, I found HTML Formatter. Now, you may think it's just a program that formats HTML code, but it's designed to format ColdFusion code, in fact, it was designed specifically for ColdFusion. If you go to the link above, you'll see a YouTube video: Through some detective work, I found the developer, Matt Pressnall, and contacted him. Eager to try it out before hearing from him, however, I paid the $14.99 and bought the program, and I was pleased with the results. I realized though it's called HTML Formatter, and it does format HTML, it was written for ColdFusion, and if you check it out, you'll see that the video on the homepage uses a ColdFusion example. Matt contacted me back, and we got talking, and I realized that this, and he, would make a good interview for CFConversations, and it would help get the word out about HTML Formatter. We talk about what led to Matt creating the application, how it can work within your Eclipse workflow but also with any other code editor, how it's currently Windows only, the licensing, how it works and what it can do over built in tools. We also get into some of the other interesting things about Matt, such as working with his wife, who is a web designer, his company, Copper Six, his experiences working with Ryan Stewart prior to him joining Adobe, some other projects he's worked on, and an interesting story of a viral video he created while his wife was expecting their first child. Check that one out, it's quite cool! This episode was recorded over the holidays, on December 28, 2009. Enjoy! Run time: 46:45

CFConversations 42, Interview 28 - David Stockton of Intergral (FusionReactor)

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:12:00 -0400

For this episode, here's an interview recorded on October 21 with David Stockton of Intergral, the company best known for their server monitoring tool FusionReactor and their ColdFusion debugger, FusionDebug. David discusses their long awaited analytics tool FusionAnalytics, which I can't WAIT to get my hands on! You can sign-up for the beta here once it's out (it's still in Alpha): http://www.fusion-reactor.com/labs/signup.cfm The potential of FusionAnalytics, if it lives up to the hype, is big. I am looking forward to seeing what it can do. David and I also talk at length about FusionReactor, some of the things he's seen during Intergral troubleshooting engagements, the framework vs. no framework discussion, ColdFusion 9, Railo and driving a beat-up 1989 VW Golf that he purchased for £82 across Europe and some of the adventures during that trip. Run Time: 1:18:27 Note: This is most likely going to be the last CFConversations episode until at least December, due to some tight project deadlines I've got coming up. Stay tuned!

CFConversations 41, Interview 27 - Blue River (Mura CMS)

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:08:02 -0400

The last, but certainly not least, of the episodes recorded at this year's CFUnited was an interview I did on Day 3, with the guys from Blue River Interactive, the company behind the open source Mura CMS. Specifically, I interviewed:

Sean Schroeder
Matt Levine
Ryan Thompson
Malcolm O'Keeffe

This was a very fun interview to do, and I think that comes out in the recording. We talk about Mura, its beginnings, how Blue River markets themselves and Mura to other companies (very interesting to hear; it certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities), the name change (from Sava CMS), the guts of the CMS and Mura's reception at conferences, in the blogosphere and user group community, among other things. If you haven't looked at Mura yet, I strongly suggest you have a good look at it. I think you'll be impressed! My recent exposure to Mura motivated me to get this interview. I have been told that I am somewhat frugal when it comes to giving out compliments, :-) I don't speak highly of something unless I mean it... and I do mean it when it comes to Mura, and no, they're not paying me to say that! Enjoy! Run time: 1:04:38

CFConversations 40, Interview 26 - Mark Phillips of Vertabase

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:58:10 -0400

This episode's much later than expected, due to back to back but unrelated computer outages, and then several delays this month, but we're finally back with a new episode! And I apologize, but we won't be having any episodes recorded from MAX or CFinNC, and we'll only have stuff from this past weekend's bFusion/bFlex if we're lucky enough to have one of the guys record some for us (I'll update this once I know one way or another). On this episode, we have another of our "Speakers of CFUnited" series, even though CFUnited has long since come and gone. This is an interview Mark Phillips of Standpipe Studios, best known for Vertabase, a project management application and software as a service provider that's written in ColdFusion. I remembered Mark was at a Birds of a Feather at MAX 2007 that I hosted, where we discussed ColdFusion in the Enterprise. I was curious, as a lot has changed since that BOF. In the two years since that conference, we have two new and viable open source ColdFusion engines, a new ColdFusion 9 and much more. I asked what does any of that means for a company like his that sells both hosted applications and source code. We also discuss the conference (from a Day 1 perspective), project management, the Vertabase application, AIR and dogs (briefly). This interview took place on Day 1 of the CFUnited 2009 conference, which was August 12th. Enjoy! Run time: 30:49

CFConversations 39, Interview 25 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan Return!

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:01:00 -0400

I am happy to give you this second interview with Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe, following up the one we did at cf.Objective() 2009. This one was recorded on Thursday, August 20th over Skype.

In this post-CFUnited interview, we talk about the conference, both from each of their perspectives, and the corporate Adobe perspective. You may be surprised that one of them... well, you'll have to listen to find out!

I ask them about what they think about 4CFF.org, which was announced at CFUnited. Adobe isn't actually involved in 4CFF at this point, but they comment on it individually.

Since the last time we had sat down at CFObjective, Adam and Terry have been busy people! They both did stops on the user group tour, so I ask how the tour was for both of them. Since this was Adam's second tour, I also ask him how the ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) tour compared to the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) tour two years ago.

Also since the last interview, ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder were released as public betas. I asked how the participation and response has been so far. It may or may not be common knowledge that ColdFusion Builder was built on Aptana Studio. I ask why Aptana was chosen over the Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst engines, which were also built on Eclipse.

From the last interview, I followed up on something that had been hinted at during the last interview: Battles with Adobe Marketing. I try to dig more to get some dirt, but I got a very good explanation of why certain things get held back. Specific to that, I ask about their/Adobe's efforts to get the word out about ColdFusion beyond the current developer base.

I ask about a couple of things that were recently posted on Twitter:

Terry's repost of this post, and some of the posts that preceded it.
Terry talks about apologizing for not being Ben Forta.

Note: Speaking of Twitter, I have setup a Twitter account specific to CFConversations, in addition to the ones I have for the Cleveland CFUG and my own: coofuushun.

We didn't get to touch on the CFML Advisory Committee much last time, so I ask more about it this time.

Adam and I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to have this interview, so Some questions to ask (names not identified to protect the innocent):

Do you have a release schedule for ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder?
When are you releasing ColdFusion 9?
How much will CFBuilder cost?
More info on EC2 licensing?
Will the ColdFusion 9 licensing be changed to allow for development and staging licenses? (You may want to listen to the podcast for this answer specifically!)
Is ColdFusion so powerful that it can create a problem that ColdFusion itself cannot solve?

An aside: I'd like to congratulate Adam and Rachel on their recent announcement!

Run Time: 1:00:51

CFConversations 34, Interview 23 - Lawrence Cramer (corrected)

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:29:02 -0400

Note: This episode had an issue in the recording that has since been corrected. Hence, I am reposting. The first of a deluge of CFConversations episodes is upon you! It's time to break the log jam! This episode that is one of the Speakers of CFUnited series, is an interview with Lawrence Cramer, who you may know from Cartweaver. Lawrence is speaking (in one hour! - apologies to all) on Real World eCommerce with ColdFusion, and he talks about his presentation. He also talks about how he got started in Dreamweaver and later ColdFusion, ColdFusion 9/ColdFusion Builder (still code named, at the time) and some other projects. Run time: 40:11 (was 36:17) [8/17 Update: There was a track overlap at around the 20 minute mark of the recording. It was mentioned to me, but not fully explained, so I only went back to listen to it today - 8/17 - and finally confirmed the issue. The track has been corrected, and now no longer overlaps. Apologies to all!]

CFConversations 35, Interview 24 - Barney Boisvert

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:10:35 -0400

Another one from the backlogs, this episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series features Barney Boisvert. This is a great episode, which was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective in May. Barney talks about his session, CFGroovy - Groovy for the CFML Developer, which he's doing Thursday at 4:45pm at CFUnited. Of course, that means he talks about Groovy and why he uses it with CF. We also talk about Hibernate, Grails, Fusebox and his mini Fusebox-inspired framework called FB3Lite. This is a great interview that I think you'll enjoy! Run time: 58:04

CFConversations 33, Interview 22 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe!

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:27:00 -0400

On Day 3 of cf.Objective() 2009, May 16th, I was able to interview Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe. I knew Adam back when he was a user group manager. Adam's been with Adobe for three years, first as a ColdFusion specialist on the sales team, and later as a product evangelist for ColdFusion and government. He recently took over as product manager for ColdFusion and Bolt, the code name for the new ColdFusion IDE. Terry, or Terrence as you might know him, joined Adobe this year as a product evangelist for both ColdFusion and Adobe in education. Before that, he was an Adobe Community Expert, and an IT director at the Wharton School of Business. In this interview, we talk about Centaur, Bolt, the reaction so far, presenting the new stuff, release dates, and what might be coming in what might be called ColdFusion 10 and the second release of Bolt. We talk about what it's like to be former ColdFusion fanboys now working for Adobe, and for Adam, taking over the reigns of ColdFusion. I also ask Adam about his recent accident while in London for a Wee Dram of Scotch and his recovery, the CFML standards committee, and the other open source engines. We also talk about the user group tour, which starts today, is hopefully coming to a city near you in June. Check your local user group's website, or groups.adobe.com, for more information. In Cleveland, Adam is coming June 17th, and you can find out more and RSVP by going to www.clevelandcfug.org. Please note: RSVP is for those who will attend the meeting in person. This is not going to be recorded or available on the web. Sorry... this is a in-person event only! The only thing I regret about this interview is that it's not long enough, but that's all the time we had. I didn't get to ask everything I wanted, and skimmed the surface on several topics. However, maybe that's a good thing. I hope to sit down again with each of them very soon. A few announcements... Several people have asked for my What to Do When OO Fails You in ColdFusion" presentation from CFObjective. I'm going to be presenting it next month to the CFMeetup group, and I had some issues with my demo code for the conference, so I'm going to hold off posting it until that presentation's over and I have better demo code. The wait will be worth it. Ryan Mannion at Politico.com contacted me, and they are looking for a Senior ColdFusion developer. Politico.com is a high-traffic site, with 40-100 million page views per month and you may have seen them mentioned on CBS' Face the Nation or CNN. The position is full-time, in Arlington, Virginia, and if you're interested, please check it out http://www.politico.com/employment/senior_coldfusion_developer.html. If you haven't found it yet, there's a new ColdFusion podcast out there. It's called CFHOUR(), with Dave Ferguson and Michael Sean Becker. They're up to episode 9, and you can find them in iTunes and at cfhour.com. Lastly, and I don't know who to thank, but just before CFObjective, a beautiful new 24" ASUS monitor showed up at my door. The shipping label had my name for both the bill to and the ship to, so I'm not sure who sent me this wonderful monitor. It appears to be an upgrade from one that was on my Amazon wishlist. Whoever you are, thank you. If you're curious, my Amazon wishlist can be found here. Run time: 43:27

CFConversations 31, Interview 21 - The "Railo Gang of Four" from cf.Objective() 2009

Fri, 15 May 2009 03:46:00 -0400

I've finally managed to get out an episode! Woo hoo! I'm happy to finally break the long hiatus. Recorded on Day 1 of cf.Objective() 2009, this features an interview with the new "Railo Gang of Four": Gert Franz, Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Sean Corfield. We go into how Sean, Peter and Mark each joined Railo, Railo UK and Railo US' corporate ties to the Swiss mothership, and how they are building a consultancy. I also ask them some challenging questions, like Railo going after the enterprise market of Adobe's, the relationship with Adobe, preaching to those Java and PHP developers they'd promised, and how the new guys each lost their Community Expert ties with Adobe. It's a great interview, and it was something I could turn around fairly quickly (only a few hours), given the fairly decent quality of the recording and little editing needed. Thanks guys, for doing this! Run Time: 42:30 A few It's worth noting that the Peter Bell and Sean Corfield interviews are NOT this interview. I interviewed Peter back in February, before the hiatus and him joining Railo. Sean's interview was on May 3rd, after him joining Railo, so it appears there are a lot of Railo episodes in the pipe. Also, much to my disappointment, I have been unable to get a Day 0 or Day 1 roundtable done. Although I had interested people each night, both roundtables fell through. I'm going to try again on Day 2. I'm hoping that getting this episode out during the conference will help get a few more interviews and a roundtable done tomorrow (well, today, I guess). :)

CFConversations 30, Interview 20 - Charlie Arehart - 02/24/2009

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:05:00 -0400

For the fourth installment in our Speakers of CFUnited series, I interview longtime pillar of the ColdFusion community Charlie Arehart. This interview covers a lot of ground. We got into a lot and uncovered some of Charlie's own personal "hidden gems". We talk about Charlie's early career before ColdFusion as a Model 204 developer and the parallels between the ColdFusion and Model 204 communities, the early ColdFusion community, his involvement with ColdFusion user groups, speaking, and writing, his time at New Atlanta evangelizing BlueDragon, leaving there and going independent, and the type of work he does with ColdFusion today as an independent consultant. We find out Charlie is an old "song and dance man". We also talk about Charlie's seminary studies, and what he plans to do with it once he graduates. This is a great interview, and I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't know Charlie, you will after listening, and you will know him even better if you already know him. Charlie is one of the nicest guys around, and his detailed knowledge of ColdFusion and teaching that knowledge are what makes him one of our community's greatest assets. Of the episodes we recorded at MAX 2008, the sound quality of this interview is definitely the best of the lot. The audio quality is as good as you can get for taking it in a hallway at a major conference, and you can hear both of us very well throughout the interview. Enjoy! Run time: 1:06:33

CFConversations 29, Interview 19 - Douglas Knudsen

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:06:00 -0400

In our third installment of the Speakers of CFUnited series, Dan Wilson interviews Douglas Knudsen, consultant with Universal Mind, who is speaking on Connecting Flex to ColdFusion at CFUnited. Doug talks about topics from his talk at CFUnited, working in a coworking group environment instead of working from home, his start with ColdFusion, and music to work to, including Chinese Silk music. Run time: 46:37

CFConversations 28, Interview 18 - Luis Majano - 02/03/2009

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:50:00 -0400

Yes, I've gotten through my computer problems! This is first episode almost entirely edited with my new Gateway desktop computer. I've also added a beautiful new ASUS 22" 1080p monitor to replace my old 22" NEC CRT, more memory and a new KVM switch. I'd like to thank Charlie Arehart and past donations I've already thanked in previous episodes to help make those additions possible. This episode was edited in a brand new "studio" of sorts. Over the holidays, I set up a new office in my house for podcasting and other work, built a desk I had received as a Christmas gift back in 2007, and all in all have a much better setup now than the tiny mobile desk I had before. Recent delays were not due to hardware at all, but were mostly audio related, as well as some health issues in my family that have taken some time away from the computer. As mentioned here, the audio from the Meet the ColdFusion Birds of a Feather at MAX 2008 has severe problems, making it very difficult to edit. Sixty hours of editing - yes, that's right - 60 - have not produced an episode of enough quality for me to release it. One good thing from the experience is that I'm now using Audition for my editing, and, after a bit of a learning curve, it really gives you a lot of power. I think I can still recover at least some of the content from the BOF, but I've decided to put that on hold for a few episodes and release some interviews, including a couple that have been on the shelf for a while. For our second episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series, Adam Haskell and I interview Luis Majano, the creator of the ColdBox framework. This was recorded October 24, 2008, so it predates the MAX conference, the Bolt announcement, and Adobe layoffs, and ColdBox is now up to version 2.6.2. Of course, Luis talks about Coldbox, but he also talks about growing up in El Salvador during its civil war, including Salvadoran cuisine, coming to America, how he started in ColdFusion, pre-Coldbox, what led to Coldbox and why Luis is excited about ColdFusion's future. This interview, which was originally scheduled to be released before MAX, is one of my favorites so far. It was delayed due to some time sensitive episodes, vacation, and the MAX episodes (including ones not yet released, as mentioned earlier) but I'm proud to bring it to you now, and I think you'll really enjoy it! Run time: 1:07:26 CFConversations wants to let listeners know that the UK CFUG, including Mark Drew, Niklas Richardson, Neil Middleton, Andy Allan and Kevin McCabe are now doing a monthly podcast called CF Docs. It's on iTunes, and you can find it here. And, the ColdFusion Muse, Mark Kruger, has released his first podcast episode in some time.

CFConversations 27, Interview 17 - Doug Hughes - 01/18/2009

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 02:58:00 -0400

For our first episode of 2009, we begin a new series of podcasts, called The Speakers of CFUnited. In this episode, Doug Hughes, best known for his Alagad consulting company and as the creator of the Reactor framework. They discuss, among other things, Alagad, Reactor, advice for developers who want to start their own consulting company, and the future of ColdFusion. Although the first three episodes in this series do not specifically talk about CFUnited, expect most of these interviews will include some information about their planned sessions at CFUnited, along with the usual interview stuff. We're planning a lot of activity around CFUnited, and we have some special things coming up in upcoming months between CFConversations and CFUnited. Stay tuned! And thanks to Dan Wilson for producing another great interview episode! Run time: 54:12 (NOTE: Episode 27 was originally going to be a portion of the Meet the ColdFusion Team BOF session recorded at MAX 2008 North America. Why it's delayed is explained here.

CFConversations 23, Interview 16 - Michael & Judith Dinowitz, with a special MAX announcement!

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:32:00 -0400

For our final podcast before MAX, we have a very special interview with Michael & Judith Dinowitz, of the House of Fusion, Fusion Authority and Flex Authority. Michael and Judith announce that they are giving away CDs with all issues of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and Flex Authority at the MAX 2008 ColdFusion Unconference and Flex unconference. Of course, you'll be able to purchase subscriptions, too! Of course, we don't stop there! Michael & Judith go back to the beginning of ColdFusion, so Adam (who came in as an emergency interviewer, when my Skype recorder would only record my voice) and I ask about the early days of ColdFusion, the start of House of Fusion and the CF-Talk list, how Fusebox started with the help of CF-Talk, the technical side of the House of Fusion, other lists on House of Fusion, how Fusion Authority got started, then Flex Authority, the difficulties editing and publishing two journals, and family life. Since we didn't have enough time to do a pre-MAX roundtable, we end the episode in a mini-roundtable fashion, speculating on what Adobe will announce at MAX next week. You may hear a few weird things in the recording. It couldn't be helped, given the recording on Skype. Run time: 1:21:15