After y/day's article "So long, and thanks for all the CF", a lot of people have been saying a lot of very flattering things. I've decided I'd sound even more like a wanker than usual if I thanked everyone individually, so I'll just say "hey, thanks for the kind words" once, now. That was it just there.
I'm also fascinated no-one has (yet) said "good riddance" or some such. I figured I'd get a bit of that. Perhaps ppl are keeping their thoughts to themselves.
A couple of updates.
I tried to switch off the @cfmlNotifier feed, but for some reason it's still broadcasting?! This is really odd because generally speaking I need to restart it every day anyhow. Weird. On that: someone's picked up the reins on that project, has grabbed my code and is trying to work out what drugs I was on when I wrote it as we speak. They hope to have it up and running shortly (they mentioned 24h, but no pressure ;-).
In one of my blog comments someone indicated I seemed to be not only leaving the community, but also slamming doors behind me: what with the renaming of the blog, the new subdomain (just "blog" rather than "blog"), unsubscribing from mailing lists etc. I can assure you I leave the community with no sense of malice at all. The simple fact is I have been focusing on CFML because I have been paid to... now I'm not being paid to: I'm not going to focus on it. My after-hours hobby is computer programming, not necessarily computer programming in CFML. I take what I do seriously, and I believe any dev who is to be taken seriously ought to be doing dev in their spare time as well as 9-5. Accordingly when I take my job as a CFML developer seriously, I look under rocks, open the cans (of worms), and stir the pot. But I simply won't be doing that with CFML any more, because I won't be using CFML any more. After I get up to speed with PHP, I'll probably do it to PHP instead. As you might have already noticed ("PHP: how does PHP deal with same-named form values? [shudder]", "PHP's error "handling". Oh dear"), I've already been calling it into question.
The "rebrand" is just - as Dom said in his response to that comment - just tech-neutralising it all, and being more representative of the content, going forward. I'm not really going to be writing about CFML any more (there's one more article in the pipeline), so it would be stupid for this thing to stick with its association to CFML. It's not like I'm unpersoning all the articles, and changing the historic "CFML" references to "PHP" or anything!
Also bear in mind I have already rebranded once. This used to be "Adam Cameron's ColdFusion Blog", but the more I started working with Railo, the less it seemed sensible to describe it as a ColdFusion blog, so changed it to "CFML".
I have remained subscribed to the ##ColdFusion IRC channel on freenode because people there are my friends, not simply ppl I know from the CFML community. I unsubscribed from CF-Talk and CF-Guru because... they're actually not very good. And in the case of the latter: tragically misnamed, I'm afraid.
Someone suggested I should not withdraw my blog from the coldfusionbloggers.org feed, because there's plenty of other blogs on there that are not CFML-related. I'm unconvinced, but I have left it as-is for the time being. I guess I'll leave it to Ray to decide if the content continues to be relevant to his target community. This blog has its own RSS feed for that matter. See the box over on the right towards the top. I've just noticed this article isn't being listed there (I am adding this paragraph after publishing, having forgotten to mention this initially), so I had best look @ what Feedburner is doing there. It probably needs to be told of the name change, I guess. If I need to update those links for a new URL, I will.
So why won't I be using CFML any more, at all? I'm not specifically going "Right! No more CFML! Get behind thee, Satan!" or anything like that. It simply has just become irrelevant to me. And not in a mean-spirited way, just a matter-of-fact way. I have got a huge project ahead of me, I'm going to be expected to demonstrate some team leadership whilst on said project, and I currently can't do much more in the language we'll be using than "G'day World". I'm seriously going to need to focus solely on PHP for the next year. I'll stick with the job for a year or two after that, and beyond that I can't say: predicting the IT industry beyond a coupla years out is a mug's game, IMO. But I'm currently 44, and the next job I look for after that really needs to be slightly further away from the keyboard than I currently am, I think. I am not discounting a return to CFML completely (I'll burn no bridges), but I can emphatically say that if I end up back developing CFML after this new job, that's an indicator that something has gone wrong with my career. A manager of a dev team doing CFML? Sure. Coding in it? That would be indicative of something getting screwed up for me. And I don't mean that as an indictment of CFML, just of how my professional life would be progressing if that was the case.
None of this is supposed to be seen as an indictment of anyone currently using and enjoying CFML. I did not mean it that way. The only person I measure by my actions is myself.
Why PHP?
I am a corporate drone. And a drone in a company that was bought by another company, and the larger company - who was a competitor in the same industry - already has the same product as we did, except it's bigger and more firmly-established than ours. Whilst there's a strong case for maintaining both brands, there is no sensible case for maintaining both systems, and - more to the point - two entirely disparate dev teams. Both the infrastructure costs and the personnel costs in having two systems simply don't make sense to maintain. That's it. So we are rebuilding our market presence using their system. This should be seen as no slight on CFML, or any particular recommendation of PHP: it's a commercial decision. If we were the larger of the two companies and we bought them out: we'd be porting their stuff to our app. But that's not what happened.
Lastly, yesterday I retweeted this:
If u follow #ColdFusion history with devs,u will notice all experienced ppl left CF or @ least CF become low proirity. learn from history ;)
— Shirak Avakian (@ShirakAvakian) September 11, 2014
I agree with the message, except for perhaps the usage of the word "all". I took the message at face value, and retweeted it with the same sentiment. The message says nothing negative about CFML, and there is no reason for people to take it personally. It is, pretty much, a fact. And the last sentence is good advice. It's not even as if Shirak is the first person to suggest this... I RTed it because I "probably thought that tweet was about me", or at least in relation to my blog article, and I thought it was poignant to remind people. Seriously: don't have all your irons in the same fire. CFML is dwindling, and that "fire" will eventually just be ashes. Don't take it personally: it's not your fault (it's Macromedia's and Adobe's fault). Just take it on board.
Oh... very last thing... I had a chuckle when I checked my blog stats yesterday: it was the busiest day ever for the blog (and the first time I got over 600 visits). I wonder what that says?
Anyway... this was supposed to be two paras. I better shut the hell up and go do something productive.
Thanks again, everyone, for all the kind things you said yesterday. FWIW, I am quite sad to be moving on. And you lot just made it slightly more emotional again. Bastards.
--
Adam
