In honor of "How I got started in ColdFusion" day, I thought I'd briefly share my story. I was introduced to CF in 1999, after graduating with an Associates degree in Web design/Visual Communications from a local community college. These were the early days of the Internet (the original "bubble" before it burst). I started work at a local Yellow Pages company designing simple one and two page HTML sites for clients, but that quickly morphed into much more.

I was soon required to start doing more advanced Web development, and the tool our department used was ColdFusion (version 4, I think). I knew nothing about it, and hadn't taken any official CIS/programming classes, but had used computers ever since I was about eight years old. It was about that age I started writing programs in Basic, so picking up programming in CF was fairly easy for me. I took several intense courses on relational database design, XML, and Web programming and quickly got very proficient at application development. I was soon writing database-driven applications built on top of ColdFusion with Oracle backends that were being served up to people all over the world.

Were my first few apps good? Probably not. I've learned so much since I first started in CF, and continue to learn new things every day. While I still don't consider myself a "Jedi", yet, I think I've created some pretty quality work. I'm now using CF8 and 9 on top of SQL Server to create some very cool stuff, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the future brings for ColdFusion and the Web. With other awesome technologies like jQuery, Flex, and AIR, there is so much still to be done, and I think we've only just scratched the surface so far.