How I got started with ColdFusion

I know I am a little late to the game on this topic, however better late then never.

I had just left a trucking company where I was doing SysOp work on an AS/400 including RPG/400, CL/400 and various PC support activities and had joined a small WebDev shop by the name of DESIGN/fx.  They needed an HTML coder, but soon found themselves in need of a second programmer.  I volunteers to step up and fill that role.   At the time we were using a language by the name of iPerform, iPerform was a windows scripting language that ran as a CGI inside of IIS.  It was clunking and really didn't perform, but it was what we had at the time.

We were in the middle of a project to launch a community portal, South Jersey Online, when we came across this new CGI language called ColdFusion.  We downloaded the trial and did some initial development with the product and found we could do things 10 times as fast as we could with iPerform.  We went to management and told them we wanted to restart the project that was weeks from launch using this new technology, reluctantly we got their approval to do so and we quickly went to work.  Six weeks later we had a functioning site, with administration tools, that went into beta and launched shortly thereafter.

A couple of months later the first boxed version of ColdFusion was released and I have never looked back, having used every major and minor release of the product.

Thank you to the Allaire brothers and everyone else who has shaped the language along the way to where we are now.