The rumours I've been seeding recently have turned out to be true. Today I got confirmation that I am leaving the CFML community and joining the PHP one.
The reason for this is a technology shift @ my place of employment, and I was given the option to apply for a role in the PHP team, and I've just found out I've been accepted.
This is good news for me. PHP is a funny old language ("PHP: a fractal of bad design"), but then again so is CFML. And, really, they're both much of a muchness, I reckon. The benefit is that there are more opportunities for PHP developers out there. And I've been doing CFML for over a decade, and whilst I'm still finding stuff to learn on a weekly basis, the volume of the learning being done is minimal. This is partly why I've been looking at Ruby / PHP / Other Stuff on the side: I just like pottering around.
So... here we are on "Adam Cameron's CFML Blog". What's gonna happen to that?
The short term answer is that it'll be changing name and domain to something technology agnostic shortly: I've not decided what yet. It's not going to be "Adam Cameron's PHP blog" though. Probably "Adam Cameron's Dev Blog" or something. And the domain will change to just blog.adamcameron.me. I've not sorted that out yet.
The longer term answer is: I'll have to see how it goes. I started this blog because I thought I could add something to the corpus of CFML material out there, and I have a different - but still informed - take on things relating to CFML. Plus I have a lot of experience in it, and I wanted to share that experience with the rest of ya. This will not be the case with PHP: I am not currently much more advanced than "G'day World", so I don't really know what I have to offer by commenting on the language. I suppose one niche is just tracking what it's like to be learning the language. So I'm mulling that over.
As far as the CFML community goes, I can confirm this:
- I will not be testing or investigating CFML any more. There must have been a collective sigh of relief from the Adobe ColdFusion Team just then.
- I will still be helping people on Stack Overflow and IRC and Twitter and stuff like that. It's not like I will suddenly be forgetting about CFML completely. I might be putting less focus on it.
- I have already withdrawn my subscription from various mailing lists (CF-Talk, CFGuru). I will be unsubscribing from the Railo Google group too, shortly.
- I am surrendering my role as "Approver" and "Ray's Bitch" on cflib.org. Yeah, Ray: I know I'd told you about the former, but the latter must come as a surprise to you. Sorry to be telling you this way. It's not you, it's me.
- I will not be posting notifications about new blog articles to the "ColdFusion Developers" group/circle/whateverTF they're called on Google+. So if that's how you've been finding out about my articles and want to continue to track me, you'll need to do it some other way.
- I will be asking Ray to take me off the Coldfusionbloggers.org Feed aggregator.
- I will be discontinuing the @cfmlnotifier Twitter feed.
- My Twitter name will be changing to... um... I think @dacdev or something. Not sure yet.
- I'm still going to CFCamp.
- And I'm still gonna finish that CFScript documentation article.
Do you know what someone - or all of you - need to do though? Stop putting up with mediocrity from Adobe, and from your colleagues in the community. My main thrust on this blog and my activity in the community has been to try to encourage / bully people into lifting their game. Especially Adobe. It doesn't need to be me doing this: you're all capable of it. If something isn't right... tell them (whoever the "them" is for the given situation). I think we've made good progress on this over the last year or so, but it does unfortunately require a rallying of the troops and advising Adobe en masse that they're not doing their jobs as well as we think they should be. The community needs to keep at them.
As far as our colleagues in the community go: don't accept crap from people. Encourage everyone to write their best CFML code all the time. Help people on forums, and Stack Overflow and stuff. It's a good learning experience, and you will help consolidate and strengthen the CFML community. The CFML community needs consolidation and strengthening, after all.
I think that's it.
--
Adam