Brian Meloche's Blog - CFConversations

About to leave for CFUnited

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:15:00 -0400

I am about to leave for CFUnited... I just wanted to just send out a quick post. It's been a while since I've released a CFConversations episode, just due to me being insanely busy on a bunch of things. There hasn't been any time for a podcast, but I'll be trying to get some out this week, including ones recorded at the conference. I'll be hosting a day 1 open mike round table podcast scheduled for 5:30 on Wednesday, and CFConversations will be situated in the Legolas room throughout the conference, interviewing and podcasting away. Anyone who's at the conference can attend the open mike session, to listen and/or participate, and I'll be looking to schedule interviews throughout the conference. That's all I have time for right now, but for more, see here: http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2009/8/11/I-know-I-know-On-my-way-to-CFUnited

The ColdFusion and Flex Tours come to Cleveland this Wednesday!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:56:00 -0400

On Wednesday, June 17th, join us for what will be the biggest Adobe user group event in Cleveland history! All of the official Adobe groups: The Cleveland ColdFusion User Group, the Cleveland Flex User Group, the Cleveland Adobe User Group and the Cleveland InDesign User Group join forces for this big, big, BIG... SOOOOO BIGGG event that you'll want to be there! The ColdFusion 9 and Flex 4 tours are here! Adam Lehman of Adobe, who was featured on CFConversations this week, will be our speaker for this event. If you're in or near the Cleveland area, join us! It's at 6pm, and at the offices of: Dealer Tire, LLC 3711 Chester Avenue Cleveland, OH 44114 There will be food, beverages, and prizes, along with swag! If you are planning to attend, it's imperative that you RSVP on the Cleveland CFUG website. If you're not in the area, check out your user group website for more information about a tour date in your area.

CFConversations 20 - Controller Frameworks Roundtable - Part 2

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:57:00 -0400

CFConversations 20 is part 2 of a two part series on controller frameworks.

Brian Meloche (moderator)
Adam Haskell (representing Fusebox)
Ray Camden (representing Model-Glue)
Chris Peters (representing ColdFusion on Wheels)
Mark Mandel, of Transfer fame, but Transfer is an ORM framework, not a controller framework, so he wasn't representing it. On controller frameworks, Mark is framework agnostic.
Nick Kwiatkowski, who is anti-framework.

Both episode 19 (part 1) and 20 were well received by those that have listened to them so far. The plan is to do more framework roundtables over the next few months, focusing over ORM/data, dependency injection and testing frameworks.

CFConversations 19 - Controller Frameworks Roundtable - Part 1

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:48:00 -0400

I'm sorry that I haven't been blogging much on here lately. CFConversations has been taking a considerable amount of time lately, and some issues on this blog caused me not to blog here for a while. I'm also planning to make some major changes with my blog. I had hoped to do them before MAX, but it looks like they'll take place Thanksgiving week instead. I thought I'd give a brief recap of the last several CFConversations episodes prior to MAX, since I hadn't blogged about them here. Episode 19 was the first of a two-part series on controller frameworks, with:

Brian Meloche (moderator)
Kurt Wiersma (representing Mach-ii)
Russ Johnson (representing ColdBox)
John Farrar (representing SOS and Co-op)
Isaac Dealey (representing onTap)
Rick Mason (uses a simpler, homegrown framework)

CFConversations 18 - bFusion/bFlex

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:50:00 -0400

CFConversations Episode 18 was a little different than what we've had in the past. This episode featured "Man on the Street" interviews from bFusion & bFlex, two day event held in September at Indiana University, organized by Bob Flynn and the Indiana Multimedia User Group. Thanks to Bob, this episode featured selected "Man on the Street" interviews from the event. I also want to give thanks to Heather Warnsman, a member of Bob's user group, and Keith Danielson, manager of the Indiana University Flash User Group, who conducted these interviews. Listen Here! Run time: 20:25

CFConversations 17 with Joshua Cyr

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:23:00 -0400

CFConversations Episode 17 features the last of our interviews from CFUnited. On day three, Brian Swartzfager sat down with Joshua Cyr, Principal Developer at Savvy Software, the makers of Savvy CMS, and manager of the Seacoast ColdFusion and Flex Group. In this interview, Joshua talks about Savvy, selling a CMS and ColdFusion at the same time, Adobe's direction with ColdFusion, conferences, and frameworks. Listen here! Run Time: 20:33

CFConversations 16 with Josh Adams

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:16:00 -0400

CFConversations Episode 16 was our first with an Adobe person in the hot seat! On day four of CFUnited, I sat down with Josh Adams. Josh is a Systems Engineer with Adobe, specializing in ColdFusion. Before that, Josh worked in a similar position at New Atlanta and, before that, was the Atlanta CFUG manager. During this interview, we talk about working for Adobe, his time at New Atlanta, user groups (a passion Josh and I both share), open source CFML and the initiatives surrounding CF9. Listen here! Run time: 30:12

CFConversations 15 with Mark Mandel

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:15:00 -0400

I've not been blogging about CFConversations here lately, so I thought I'd get back to it. Episode 15 has Dan Wilson interviewing Mark Mandel, best known for the Transfer ORM framework. We're now up to episode 20, so expect more blog posts in the next couple of days. Listen here! Run time: 39:56

CFConversations 13 AND 14 - Hal Helms and Mark Drew!

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:35:00 -0400

I never blogged about it, but episode 13 of CFConversations was a good one! And, with episode 14, we have another good one, so I guess I'll blog about both of them now. For episode 13, Brian Swartzfager was able to interview one of the legends in the ColdFusion community, Hal Helms. On Sunday night, episode 14 came out. Adam Haskell interviewed Mark Drew. Of course, most of you know of Mark as the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, and, of course, CFEclipse is discussed, but Mark and Adam talk about a lot more during this interview, including Railo, ColdSpring, conferences, tattoos, cooking, a little about bendy buses, and a couple of things you might not know about Mark. Listen to them both! We're going to be starting a new round of interviews in the next couple of weeks, so if you would like to be interviewed and we haven't spoken about it yet, please email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com, and we'll try to get you on the schedule.

CFConversations 12 is out! Ray Camden!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:28:00 -0400

I neglected to mention a few days ago that CFConversations Episode 12 came out on Thursday, with Ray Camden. This interview was recorded at Day 2 of CFUnited. Ray was a great interview! Listen here.

CFConversations 11, Roundtable 5 is out!

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:02:00 -0400

With CFUnited quite a few weeks in the past and 10 episodes under our belt, it was time for another roundtable! We brought it back in style we've gathered 8 stellar participants including:

We had a lively podcast this time, with some great content that covers a wide range of topics. Bob Flynn announced bFusion and bFlex, where you can get two days of free hands-on training in Flex and ColdFusion at Indiana University. We also discussed the educational licensing and whether or not Bob and Richard (from Gallaudet University) thought it would make a difference at their schools. From education, we moved onto the hiring space. As you probably know, Sean's company, Broadchoice has been hiring several top developers recently, including Ray Camden, Joe Reinhart, Nicholas Lierman and Brian Kotek, and Sean shared his technique for hiring top talent that appears to be working. Note: This was recorded before it was announced that Brian Kotek also joined Broadchoice). Next, Sean talked a bit about the CFML Advisory Board. I announced that a new vendor-neutral site to promote the CFML language is in development. I pulled the domain name from the podcast because, well, we're not quite ready to completely open it up to the general public yet (the basics are up). If you are really interested in helping out, use the contact form and I'll tell you more. We asked Mark Mandel how he felt about ColdFusion 9's Hibernate functionality vs. his Transfer ORM. We all chimed in about other ColdFusion 9 functionality, and talked a bit about alternative editors and search tools. We also covered the hot topic of SQL injection, including a free tool from HP called scrawlr and a project called Query Param Scanner. We did a "final thoughts on CFUnited. Some of the things we had covered on previous roundtables, but there were a few new things. We also talked about the Railo 3 beta (now in Release Candidate) and progress on Open BlueDragon releases. Sean and Adam closed out the episode with a fairly big announcement that should have been made by now, so we sneaked it in! You'll have to listen to the podcast to know what it is. Find the episode here. Run time: 1:36:37

CFConversations 10, Interview 6 - Gert Franz of Railo

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:51:00 -0400

In case you missed it, CFConversations Episode 10 was released yesterday. On Day one of the CFUnited conference, several of us sat down with Gert Franz of Railo, correctly pronounced "Rhy-low" (not "Ray-low"). Railo, a Swiss company, sells an alternative CFML engine, also called Railo, which has been getting a lot of attention in the CF developer community in recent months. During Gert's keynote at the Scotch on the Rocks conference in early June, it was announced that version 3.0 would have support for CFVIDEO and Hibernate, which had been getting a lot of attention in the CF blogosphere, especially since the cf.Objective() conference in early May. Furthermore, Gert announced that Railo version 3.1 would be released as open source under the LGPL license, with support from JBoss and hosting from Jboss.org. The Railo open source announcement was enthusiastically welcomed throughout the CFML community, as has been documented on several previous episodes of CFConversations. Even key Adobe personnel such as Ben Forta and Adam Lehman were enthusiastic about the announcement. Also, during Adobe's keynote at CFUnited, it was announced that Gert was one of the members of the CFML Language Advisory Committee. In this episode, we talk about all of these things, some of Railo's history, and a little about Gert himself, who's a warm and very approachable person, with an interesting history that I think you'll enjoy hearing about. This was an interview that a lot of people wanted to be a part of, or just listen to in person. Also in the room were: Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jeff Coughlin, Joe Reinhart and Rick Mason, and most of them get involved in the interview at one point or another. This interview was one of my highlights of CFUnited, so I hope you enjoy it. This was the first podcast recorded at CFUnited, and we didn't have access to the Blue Snowball microphone we used for most of the interviews and round tables. This interview was recorded from three Macbook Pro built-in microphones, although one of them produced a recording that was unusable. The interview itself required substantial post production editing to make it listenable, so the quality may not be as good as episodes six through nine. However, I think, it's now in a listenable form. Due to the difficulty in editing this episode and the timeliness of other episodes, this episode got pushed back a couple of times. Ironically, this worked out, as Gert is doing a U.S. user group tour that starts on Monday, July 28th, which coincides with the release of this episode. This is the first episode where my inserts are recorded via the new headset, courtesy of Marc Esher. If you liked the new music track, it's from a band called spineCar, from the Album Up From the Mud, and the track is called "Smoke". I'm thinking it's going to be the podcast's theme song. What do you think? Run time: 56:47

CFConversations 9, Interview 5 - Nick Kwiatkowski - 07/23/08

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:35:00 -0400

In this... controversial... special mid-week episode of CFConversations, Rick Mason interviews Nick Kwiatkowski, manager of the Michigan Flex User Group, and the organizer of the Michigan Flex Camp, which will be held in East Lansing on July 30 & 31. It's a two day Flex camp that only costs $40... and that's a heck of a deal. This episode, like the last one, has a lot of Flex content, but there is a lot of ColdFusion content, too. Nick talks about what he thinks about ColdFusion frameworks, the ColdFusion "elite", Flex and "the cloud". We're using a different theme from the last episode. This track is courtesy of monstertracks.com, and it's called MEGARAT30. Tell us what you think of the music intros. We're experimenting, and will try a few more in upcoming episodes. Run time: 38:02 Listen here!

CFConversations 7, Interview 3 - John Farrar, author of ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:49:00 -0400

Our third CFConversations interview episode is out, with John Farrar of SoSensible. On July 2nd, Packt Publishing released John Farrar's ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial, their first ColdFusion title, and the first non-CFWACK title since Rob Brooks Bilson's Programming ColdFusion back in the MX 6.1 days. John's a fellow user group manager, and a friend of mine. On Day 2 of CFUnited, I interview John, along with Adam Haskell (who's listening). We talk about the new book, John's CO-OP and SOS frameworks, JQuery, CF9, open source, and the Adobe education licensing of ColdFusion announcement. We also talk about his family. John's got a big family, and I try to get down to how he can get anything done working from home with twelve kids. This was recording via Jeff Coughlin's Blue Snowball microphone, which was also used for the CFUnited Round tables. The sound had to be boosted in post production, but it seems to be good under the circumstances. There is some echo in the room. Some people have noticed a quality improvement in the last few episodes. I hope this episode's quality doesn't suffer too much from the last two. It was recorded a different way, so it may sound different. As previously mentioned in other podcasts, we're still learning how to produce these, and although we're learning more as we go, we don't have all the equipment we need to do episodes of the quality Matt and Peter of Dan Wilson and Rick Mason who purchased the first few items off of the wish list to help make the podcast a better one. Links to the book:
Packt Publishing
Amazon.com Run time: 50:19 The episode can be found here.

CFConversations 6, Interview 2 - Michael Smith of Teratech - 07/05/08

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:45:00 -0400

Our second interview episode is with Michael Smith of Teratech. We discuss putting on CFUnited, Fusebox, Teratech, the recent Adobe announcements made at CFUnited and open source CFML. I have mentioned previously that I have help with these episodes. The interviewer this time is another Brian, Brian Swartzfager, who you may recognize from the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable episodes, as well as CFConversations Episode 3. This was recorded using a handheld recorder. The quality is quite good, but it might sound a tad more "AM radio" like than some of our other episodes. Enjoy! Run time: 16:54 http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/7/5/006_Michael_Smith