ColdFusion Alive

April Graves talks about "Getting Real with Women in Tech" in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. April is a senior software engineer working on projects for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"It's interesting I started the ColdFusion user group in Orlando because I was so excited. I was new in the field. It was 1998 and it was my first programming job. I wanted to learn from people. I was really excited and so, I started the user group actually to learn. And through that group, I think is how you found me because you know, we would all kind of network and those types of things." - April Graves.

Show notes

How did speaking at conferences help your career?

She also started the ColdFusion user group in Orlando

When you teach, you learn

Met great new friends

Got invited to write a magazine article

Got audience feedback on my talk - helped me improve

Better for the job interview!

The challenge of getting women to speak at events

Schools don’t encourage girls to stand out

Women more socially aware so more sensitive to potential feedback

Perceived risk

What are issues you have experienced with being a woman in tech

Difficult being taken seriously

Being given more responsibilities

Had to work harder to get to the same responsibilities as men hired at the same time

Taking care of kids while working full time

Not being heard the same way as men in meetings

Pay gap

Women not negotiating as much or at all on new jobs

Aggression trap when speaking up (fear of the B word label)

Back talk on getting power through sex rather than ability

Manager had low expectations initially

How have you dealt with them?

Speak to it when it happens eg in a meeting

Prepare for salary negotiation using salary surveys and other tools

Better for Millennials

Everyone has something to bring to the table → better software

Giving everyone on the team a fair say

Encouraging teen women to go into STEM careers

Mentorship

Role model

Sit in the front row of class and speak up

Women in Science event

Google #Iamremarkable

Mentioned in this episode

A Google engineer wrote that women may be unsuited for tech jobs. Women wrote back. (article)

The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google (article)

A Female Tech Industry Veteran’s Response to the Googler’s Manifesto (article)

#IamRemarkable movement

@iamremarkable (Twitter)

Star VC apologizes for his role in tech's sexist culture (article)

Study: Female Coders Better Than Men, But Perceived As Worse (article)

Hear Us Roar: A Manifesto for Women and Minorities in Startup, Tech, and Business Communities (article)

Gender-Fluid Geek Girls; Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech Industry

Female and minority at Google

Listen to the Audio

Bio

April Graves

April is a Senior Software Engineer with nearly two decades of experience designing and developing software solutions for customers like the DOD, Public Safety, Financial Services and NASA. She has founded user groups, written for journals, presented at conferences, and currently a member of the NASA Speaker Bureau. April has used her education and experience to share knowledge with the new generation of Computer Scientists as a mentor and Adjunct Professor.

Links

LinkedIn

Interview Transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with April Graves. We’re going to talk about getting real with women in tech. And April is a senior software engineer working on projects for the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And has been doing software related things for many decades now. And welcome April.

April:               Hi, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Michael:          Now, I met April through the C.F. United Conference many years ago when I invited her to speaker about because so few women speakers and I thought she’ll be good presenting. And I'm kind of curious to speaking at that conference or other conferences have any impact on your career?

April:               Oh absolutely, it had a huge impact on my career. It's interesting I started the ColdFusion user group in Orlando because I was so excited. I was new in the field. It was 1998 and it was my first programming job. I wanted to learn from people. I was really excited and so, I started the user group actually to learn. And through that group, I think is how you found me because you know, we would all kind of network and those types of things.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Mark Drew talks about “Getting started fast with Docker” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. In this presentation, Mark Drew will go through the fundamentals of the Query Language, structure, use cases and how we can get started with GraphQL endpoints.

In a world where APIs and REST are the way that we can communicate with services, it can become an arduous task to get to the information you need.

For example, if you look at a single tweet, obtained from Twitter's API, you will so a stack of information that you don't need! If only there was a way to query this data to get just what you need.

Enter Facebook's GraphQL language. A language specification that solves the same problem that SQL did for Relational Databases.

Show notes

What the heck is a Docker container and why should all CFer care?

Analogy with containerized shipping of goods across the sea

The challenges they overcome

Separation of apps from how they are deployed

Need to pre-warm your server before running new code

Scripting of container building

Live and dev versions can be the same

Environment variables eg which db are we using

Able to test on load balanced cluster

Docker containers are lightweight compared to VM

Fast to start up

Able to run other types of task in micro services and micro transactions

Adobe CF vs Lucee CFML licensing on Docker

Separate lifecycle for each container

All developers in same environment

Easier port mapping running many versions of CF, db, OS etc

Safe and clean way to test out new programming languages

VMs vs Containers

Docker vs Vagrant

Are traditional ISPs going to go away?

But now you have to keep your CF etc patched

How to Get started with the Docker Engine

Install Docker

Before needed VirtualBox VM first

Now we have native versions on Linux and Windows

Kitematic to search for instances - auto download and install

Attach a volume (OS folder) to your container

Create a Docker file (it is called DockerFile!)

From command

Copy CF files

Docker Build

Commit to Docker version control such as Docker Hub private repository (or AWS repository)

Command Box

WTF is  Docker compose?

Create a whole web app environment with multiple containers for CF, db etc

Virtual networks between them

Documents the environment

How Docker Swarm can make your sites more reliable

Docker clusters

Automatic restart

Automatic adding extra Docker instances

Rolling updates across your cluster

Docker Cloud and Continuous Integration

Jenkins

Slack bot messages

Why are you proud to use CFML?

It actually gets stuff done

Modern language

Forgebox

Commandbox CFML scripting

Easy to scale

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

More Forgebox contributions

Code of conduct on GitHub

No more X vs Y flame wars - focus on the positive of X (or Y)

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Mentioned in this episode

Docker 

Amazon Docker

Heroku container provider 

Google containers Kubernetes 

CommandBox

Malcolm Mc Lean invented the common sized container in 1956

Reefer - refrigerated containers (and not something you might smoke!)

Lucee CFML

Jenkins

CIBot

VM = Virtual Machine

MongoDB

YAML (Docker Compose file format)

Puppet (for Vagrant)

Chef (for Vagrant)

Git

Repository for the containers

Ubuntu Linux

Alpine Linux

Tomcat

Headless Wind

Rancher  

Lucee Docker

Docker Hub

Docker Swarm

Docker Cloud

A WAR file

Ruby programming language

Node.js

Ortus

Forgebox

RIAForge

99Percent invisible podcast

Localhost podcast

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Drew

Mark has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability for various well-known brands in the UK market such as Jaeger, Hackett, Hobbs, Dyson, B&W, Diesel amongst others.

Links

Twitter

LinkedIn

CFML Slack

Mark (at) CMDHQ.com

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I am here with Mark Drew otherwise known as the amazing C.F.O. from London.

Mark:               There's only one of us in London.

Michael:          There’s only one, others 00:12 [crosstalk]

Mark:               There’s hundreds of them.

Michael:          Yes and he's the director of web development at C.M.D. which is a web development shop, I believe in the U.K.

Mark:               In sunny Greenwich.

Michael:          In Greenwich yes, he got Greenwich Mean Time exactly down. And he's also the co-host of a new podcast called ‘Local Host’. So, check that out too. I’ll put the link in the show notes to that.

So today, we're looking at how C.F.S. can get started fast with Docker and we're going to look at what a Dock container is and why everyone listening should care about that. The challenges they overcome, Docker versus Vagrant even controversially our traditional I.S.P. is going to go away if Docker gets his way.

And how they compare the virtual machines, how you can get started with a Docker engine. What the heck is Docker compose? And using Docker to make your sites even more reliable. Docker cloud and how you can get started with Docker.

So, welcome Mark.

Mark:               Well, thank you Michel for having me on board. This is very exciting all across the internets.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Sophia Eng talks about “Hear Us Roar: A Manifesto for Women and Minorities in Startup, Tech, and Business Communities with Sophia Eng” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. She has a passion for closing the minority and gender gap in business leadership and ownership. Recently, she founded a community group called Women in Growth, open to all women in startup, tech, and business communities for support.

Have you heard already about the Google #Iamremarkable movement?

Show notes

How men and women in tech are different and the same?

Buying patterns

Women buy the most, repeat buy more, most social sharing

AB testing and CRO

Decision making

Social conditioning vs DNA in tech skills

Women get 50% of degrees are 30% of corporate employee

Women are systems oriented too

How traditional female characteristics help in programming

Empathy for innovation

Mother coders organization helping mothers learn to code

Why she wrote her first article overcoming fear to hit publish

Hear Us Roar: A Manifesto for Women and Minorities in Startup, Tech, and Business Communities

Felt vulnerable and did it anyway

If not me, who

If not now, when

How did writing articles and speaking at events help your career?

Women supporting women group

Gender silence

Cultural silence

Children silence

WWIT for women in tech to speak up more this year?

Whether it’s speaking up in the meeting room or writing a viral blog post. Do it afraid. Do it anyway.

You’re hired to speak up, and if you don’t do it, you’re being selfish. Hurts business, hurts other women, hurts men too

The challenge of getting women to speak at events

Why fewer women attend conferences

Need to sell you going to your manager

Women have tended not to speak up, especially to men or when men are the room

The frat party atmosphere at some events

Code of conduct

What are issues you have experienced with being a woman in tech

How have you dealt with them?

Encouraging girls/teen girls to go into STEM careers

How she got involved in the Google #Iamremarkable campaign

Self-promotion is key to getting raising and promotion esp

Why are you proud to be a woman in tech?

Female and minority

Osmo kid tech game playosmo.com

Mentioned in this episode

Google #Iamremarkable campaign

STEM

Mother coders

“If not me, who? If not now, when?”

There are several possible sources for this quote including

Emma Watson on Gender Equality at the UN 

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt, I told myself firmly: if not me, who? If not now, when?”

She extends her invitation to both men and women.

“Men, I would like to give this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue, too. Because to date, I’ve seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by society. I’ve seen young men suffering from mental illness, unable to ask for help for fear it would make them less of a man. In fact, in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men between 20 to 49, eclipsing road accidents, cancer and heart disease. I’ve seen men fragile and insecure by what constitutes male success. Men don’t have the benefits of equality, either.

We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes, but I can see that they are. When they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence. If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled.

Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is the time that we all see gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. We should stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are.'

Mikhail Gorbachev said it

Rabbinic sage Hillel the Elder said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when

Code of conduct

Timeline of sexual harassment at tech events from 1963-present

Update - extra related items:

"You Just Don\'t Understand" by Deborah Tannen. This showed me how the language that men and women speak is very different (in grammar, vocab and meaning) and can lead to misunderstandings where none are intended.

This article "Still not on MathOverflow" by top female math professor Izabella Laba might help you understand the way that female scientists and academics are treated by men in the field. (Hint - generally it is not good treatment)

And this is her original article about how badly men treat women in online forums for math, gaming etc.

She also writes about gifted women and some of the problems they face due to their gender:

“Men are often judged on their potential, but women are judged on their achievements,” Williams explains, adding that women have to provide more evidence of competence to be considered as competent as their male colleagues. What’s more, “women’s mistakes tend to be noticed more and remembered longer, but women’s successes tend to be attributed to luck.”Williams calls this pattern “prove it again.” Women literally need to prove themselves over and over again, where a similarly situated male colleague does not, she explains.The obvious solution to this problem would be for women to engage in serious self-promotion, by broadcasting their accomplishments and minimizing their faults. But, says Williams, self-promotion has its pitfalls. No one likes a braggart, especially if she is a woman. Instead, coworkers expect women to be modest and community-minded.

"The “greater male variability” hypothesis is alive and well. There’s no shortage of talking heads and internet commenters assuring us that women are innately uninterested in demanding careers and must prioritize domesticity to feel happy and fulfilled. Hollywood films serve up stories of high-achieving professional women who are miserable, psychologically damaged, and/or must be saved from themselves by a man with a good heart."

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Sophia Eng

Sophia Eng is a tactical and intuitive growth advisor and consultant to women in startups and small businesses. She also holds the position of Senior Manager, Online Marketing at InVision App. Views are her own.

Sophia has a passion for closing the minority and gender gap in business leadership and ownership. Recently, she founded a community group called Women in Growth, open to all women in startup, tech, and business communities for support.

Links

Hear Us Roar Manifesto

Sophia's Website

FB group women in growth

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Sophie 00:03 [Eng] who published a blog post that went viral talking about women in tech. Her post was all about 00:12 [inaudible] role. It was a manifesto for women and minorities in startups, tech and business communities.

So, we're going to be talking about how men and women are different and the same in tech. And how traditional female characteristics actually can help in programming. And that applies to both men and women who have those characteristics.

And how she came to overcome her fear about publishing her first article that went viral. And how writing articles and speaking at events can help your career. So, we'll talk about a number of other things too. So, welcome Sophia.

Sophia:            Thank you so much Michael, very excited to be here, really appreciate and really honor the opportunity to share more of my story and my experiences on being a woman, a minority in tech.

Michael:          Yeah so, you actually have been researching this for a while. You're basically a growth hacker or you help people improve their conversion rates and marketing on their websites and startups particularly with women. And also, you’re involved in the Google ‘I am remarkable’ movement and several other initiatives. And we'll talk more about those later.

But you've been researching how men and women are different online or maybe they’re just the same and you can't tell. What's the scoop?

Sophie:            So you know, I have been sitting on some of this research for a couple of weeks now. And looking at the differences not just biologically but even how women and men make different purchasing decisions, right. And how important it is for businesses to understand how to speak directly to women and men as well and how to create products around that.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious ri

Charlie Arehart talks about “What's New In CF 10, 11, and 2016 That You May Have Missed?” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. In this presentation, veteran CFer Charlie Arehart will help fill these gaps for you, highlighting the top features of 10, 11, and 2016, along with some hidden gems. (Whereas his classic "hidden gems" talks have gone deep to uncover a few dozen features per release, this talk will necessarily focus on just some key ones.) With demos and resources for learning more, you'll be in a better position to take full advantage of your new CF installation.

 

Show notes

Why should CFers care about new features CF10?

When it was released 5 years ago and has gone end of life earlier this year

Because some people may only now be moving from 9 or earlier to 10 or later

Or people on 10 or above may not have paid attention to what was new then

Highlighting the top features of CF10, CF11 and CF 2016 along with the hidden gems

Tags, functions

Admin features

Security features

Installer improvements

more

Don’t some updaters also add new features? Yep, as well as bug fixes, security fixes

Sometimes functionality is removed in updaters (like YUI-based features removed with new CF2016 installer released in Dec 2016)

But what about Compatibility issues?

Adobe tries to remain backward compat, but some problems in each version

In CF10 especially, charting engine changed, causing many issues for some

Good news about trying updates: single click to install AND to uninstall

If update fails, try stopping CF and doing manual installation

Licensing issues differences between versions

There are changes related to this in each release

Some missed that in CF9, Adobe allowed for use of prod license for dev, staging and testing (in addition to long-existing Developer edition)

Some aspects of that tightened up in CF 11, 2016

Also often changes about cores, vm’s, cloud deployment

Read the ColdFusion EULA to know what’s changed

JVM updates: each release comes on latest JVM version at the time of CF installer build

Adobe always supports updating to latest available jvm update for that version

Certain updates also support moving to next major JVM version

Learning what’s new/different helps you take full advantage of your CF installation

Resources for learning more

Charlie and Michael also talked about some recent travels

Are you moving up to CF2016, or maybe 11? In doing so, are you skipping over 11, or perhaps even 10, in that move?

Shops often drag their feet upgrading from one version of CF to another and may well skip multiple releases in the process, so that they may not have paid attention to what was new in the release(s) skipped. Can you name the top 5 or 10 features/changes in these three most recent releases?

Mentioned in this episode

Charlie Arehart's Ultimate List of 200+ New ColdFusion 10 Features 

ColdFusion 11 New Functions and Tags 

ColdFusion 11 Hidden Gems

ColdFusion 2016 What is new 

ColdFusion 2016 Hidden Gems 

Adobe products End of Life and Release dates 

CF10 End of Life 5/16/2017

CF 11 End of Life 4/30/2019

ColdFusion EULA

All of Charlie’s presentations (over 100!)

CF2016: What's deprecated and/or 'no longer supported' (note: nothing 'removed') 

With the Update of ColdFusion 9 to ColdFusion 11 the underlying chart engine changed from WebCharts3D to ZingCharts. 

Adobe bug tracker 

Dave Epler 

CF-oriented Troubleshooting Consultants 

CF-oriented Application Development Consultants 

FusionReactor

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Links

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Web

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Charlie Arehart, veteran ColdFusion expert and he helps optimize ColdFusion service that are sick or slow. And he also does an enormous amount for the community on his website and on the CF411 website. And one of the things I've noticed him doing over the years is telling us about all the cool new stuff in different versions of ColdFusion.

And what we're going to talk about today and he's actually giving a talk on the C.F. objective on this is what's new in C.F. 10, 11 and 2016 that you may have missed. And we're going to talk about why you might even care about that because some of you listening maybe thinking; C.F. 10, you’re kidding?

But we'll address that and we'll look at some of the cool features you may have missed out on that came out in those. And we'll also look at some compatibility issues you might want to be aware of. And also how Adobe changed the licensing between versions that some of you may have missed.

So, we’ll have lots of resources if you want to more about. So, welcome Charlie.

Charlie:            Howdy sir! Long time no talk.

Michael:          Yes, must have been last week. Yes but you know, you've got such useful info and you’re giving two talks at the C.F. objective. I think I figured you deserve to have two podcast episodes. And so, let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way. You know C.F. 10 it came out years ago. I mean you were telling me before we started recording it was five years.

Charlie:            right

Michael:          Feels like more like eight or ten to me.

Charlie:            Right someone might think it was much longer. It’s only five years ago. And so, the whole reason that I'm doing this talk is that in the course of the troubleshooting that I do with people sometimes, they're coming to me saying hey, we've just implemented C.F. 2016 or hey, we just implemented C.F. 11. And I go cool, that should be pretty straightforward you know to go from eleven 2016 or 10 to 11. And then they’ll go, we were coming from C.F. 9. We’re coming from C.F. 8 and you may be surprised how often true. But it is really very, very often that people are making that big of a jump.

And so, I will frequently help people with the problems that can happen between 9 and earlier and 10 and greater. And we’ll talk a bit about that. But that's why I'm doing the talk back to what was new.

Read More

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Charlie Arehart talks about “The Impact Of Unexpected Load and How To Counter It” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He was one of the speakers at the CF.Objective Conference. In this session, veteran server troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will guide a more detailed review of the issues above, including how to identify such traffic, more on these specific impacts, and most important identifying the solutions along with their pros and cons. He has helped shops achieve dramatic reductions in impact from such automated requests, resulting in greater server stability and performance.

Show notes

Are Spiders Eating Your Servers? The Impact Of Their Unexpected Load and How To Counter It

Where does unexpected load come from?

How to identify spiders eating your servers

DOS attacks, script kiddies

Malformed requests

What Google Analytics misses in load

Load balancer testing

Use a test page rather than probing your homepage every 5 seconds

What about robots.txt? Doesn’t that block bots?

SaaS Tools that search for “bad” traffic flooding your server and don’t let it into your server

Older CFer, older resources

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

For years I’ve watched people try to tame “server problems” with a focus on their code, their SQL, the jvm, and so on. Yet often it turns out that the root cause is actually unexpected load. And that load may be from things you never expected (automated), at volumes you never expected. I’ve found folks with as much as 80% of their web traffic to be such unexpected automated traffic! Worse, there are characteristics of such automated visits that may actually have MORE IMPACT than “real users”: for instance, did you know they create a new session–and run session startup code–for each page they visit?!

The good news is there are solutions to better manage (or simply block) such automated requests which may already exist in your environment, and tools you may consider (some free, some commercial) which can be easily implemented. There are even SAAS solutions that could help alleviate such problems with just a single tiny change in your environment! You may also want to consider some admin configuration options related to sessions and/or client variables, as well as reconsider some coding choices in your session startup code.

Mentioned in this episode

Web spiders

Googlebot

Yandex

Bidu

Yahoo slurp

FusionReactor

User agent header faking

IP address spoofing

On session start

Load Testing

Robots.txt

CF411.com

Cloudflare

Cloud/SAAS Firewall-level Application Firewalls tools list 

CFML Job Resources

Ortus Solutions

CF Alive episode on What's New In CF 10, 11, And 2016 That You May Have Missed?

Mike Brunt

Scary DBA

Pass conference

Database fundamentals

CF Slack channel

FB programmers group

TeraTech blog on CFML online groups

Mary Jo Sminkey CFObj Advanced Error Handling Strategies ColdFusion Alive podcast episode

Gert Franz CFObj Debugging ColdFusion Alive podcast episode

CFML Resource Sites

Adobe CF blog blogs.coldfusion.com

2000 sales of CF per quarter

CF Summit

CF Meetup

CFObjective Twitter hashtag

Things you can do in DC

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Charlie Arehart

A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting).

Links

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Web

Interview transcript

Michael:          Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Charlie Arehart and he's a veteran ColdFusion troubleshooter. He has been doing I.T. stuff for so long. We don't even want to talk about that until the second half of the show when we will talk about how long we've been doing things and the benefits of that.

But first of all, we're going to talk about unexpected load and how you can counter it and how they may be spiders or other things you didn't even know about. In fact, could you even get to expecting unexpected load? So, lots of crazy stuff there. Charlie’s going to be talking about that at cf.Objective which is coming up soon. So, we'll talk a little bit about that.

So welcome back to the show Charlie.

Charlie:            Thank you for having me Michael. Good to see you.

Michael:          Yeah, yeah good to see you too coming to us from beautiful downtown Kentucky.

Charlie:            Not downtown, beautiful rural out.

Michael:          rural?

Charlie:            Yes, you're out in the sticks. You escape from the sick city town that's got fifteen hundred people in it.

Michael:          Goodness me!

Charlie:            That was from a city that's got you know, fifty thousand people in it. I love it.

Michael:          You’re quite a way away from dizziness.

Charlie:            And it’s beautiful here.

Michael:          You know your land used to have…

Charlie:            Right the land and then D.C. grown up in D.C.

Michael:          yeah

Charlie:            Forty's and then moving to Atlanta from my forties and now here and working from here. And that's why we came here because with the work that I do, it's all remote. I can connect to people and log you know, as long as I got a decent internet connection. I can work from here and I'm looking out at the beautiful vista of trees and sometimes turkeys and deer and all kinds of fun stuff.

Michael:          That’s amazing, it's incredible what technology has allowed people to do and I’m sure some of the listeners are working with remote as well.

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And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Steven Neiland talks about “Going Modular With Fw/1 Subsystems 2.0” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He was one of the speakers at the CF.Objective Conference,  and currently works remotely out of Tampa Florida as a senior web developer at SiteVision Inc.

Show notes

What is FW/1?

What is a framework?

Why you should be using a framework?

Why use an open source ColdFusion framework rather than a homebrew framework

Why should CFers be using FW/1 over other CF frameworks?

Light weight compared to ColdBox

What are the new subsystems 2.0?

A cut down version of a FW/1 system

Similar to ColdBox modules

What is new with FW/1 2.0 subsystems?

How to Enable subsystems

Create subsystems directory and drop the subsystem there. That is it! No config required.

Much easier than in 1.0!

How to Access subsystems

Conventions

Bean factories are easier to use eg DI/1 or Wirebox

A kind of Dependency Injection

Why should you be using subsystems?

When not to use subsystems

Auto Wiring

Why are you proud to use CF?

Easy to get started in. Build for real people rather than computer scientists.

WWIT (What Would It Take) for you to make CFML more alive this year?

Technical point of view it is very alive. STable language, no quirks,

Better PR and marketing to the masses (and not just Fortune 500). Reach schools etc

Lucee marketing tour with Gert

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Glad Adobe is back

Hanging out with the Lucee guys and new features

WWIT for you to make cf.Objective more alive this year?

A reflexion of the state of CFML

Adobe CF Summit has pull some of

Lucee more blog posts and ra-ra more awesomeness

WWIT to make Lucee more alive this year?

Better docs - key for an open source language. Expand. More comprehensive. Easier to get into

Marketing

Tech issues compared to other languages

Moment JS and CFML

Building web applications today involves writing a lot of repetitive code. Frameworks and snippets take reduce some of this right off that bat, however we can take this a step further. We FW/1's new subsystem architecture to make whole workflows reusable as modules.

By modularizing your code you can not only reuse it for other projects with minimal work, you can also share fixes and improvements between projects that use the same module automatically.

In addition, you simplify your code base by breaking you monolith down into discrete segments which you can then dedicate developers to without those developer needing to know the intricacies of the parent applications the module will integrate with later on.

Mentioned in this episode

FW/1

Sean Corfield

ColdBox

Fusebox

Ryan Cogswell created subsystems

FW/1 Sections, Items

“Stand on the shoulders of giants by using an open source framework”

Framework Abuse

Bean factory

Dependency Injection

DI/1

Wirebox

Using Subsystems in FW/1 

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Steven Neiland

Originally from Cork Ireland, Steven Neiland currently works remotely out of Tampa Florida as a senior web developer at SiteVision Inc.

Links

LinkedIn

Twitter

GitHub

Interview transcript

Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Steve Neiland and he is senior developer at ‘Site Vision’ and he's joining us here from Florida; where it's probably hot and sunny and humid as it usually is in Florida at this time of the year.

Steve: It's only eighty degrees.

Michael: Only eighty degrees. All right well that'll get you ready for Washington D.C., the height of summer where you're going to be in a few weeks at sea 00:29 [inaudible]. And today's episode, Stephen and I are going to talk about going modular with FW1- frame work 1 using subsystems and he's going to talk about a 2.0 version of that. And we'll look at what framework 1 is for those you don't know and why you should be using a framework being factories and while there are exciting things to do with that. And also about subsystems and how you enable them and access them and whether you should be using them and if so how. And we'll also have a look at see if objective and maybe we’ll mention Lucy a little bit too. So welcome Stephen.

Steve: Thanks for having me.

Michael: You're welcome. Now I hear you have a slight accent where you're originally from a country in Europe?

Steve: Yes, I'm from County Cork Ireland originally.

Michael: Fabulous, sounds beautiful. So you gave up rainy, damp weather to have hot and sunny Floridian weather.

Steve: Yes and I'm not going back I like it warm.

Michael: Well, I can understand. I used to live in England and I found it a bit rainy and dark in the winter.

Steve: What part of England were you in?

Michael: I was in a town called Maidenhead Berkshire which was in the south, still is in the south as far as I know.

Steve: you hope

Michael: Yes, I hope.

Steve: It washed away you never know.

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And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Elishia Dvorak talks about “Everything CF Summit That You Need to Know” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

She was one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference,  and she is the Technical marketing manager for ColdFusion.

Show notes

What exactly is CF Summit?

The largest developer focused Adobe conference

Largest conference focused on ColdFusion and related technologies

Large budget

Why is it so important to the CF Community?

Shows the commitment of Adobe for CF

Lots of CF tech info to learn

Why all CFer should go?

40 sessions rich with CF info

2 keynotes

optional labs and workshops

The most Adobe CF folks

Network with CFer you have only met online before

When is it?

Thurs-Friday Nov 16-17 2017

Wed Nov 15 optional labs and workshops

Where is it?

The Mirage, Las Vegas

The hotel is nearer the conference floor (2 minutes from the elevator to the conference space. No need to walk

Tropical pool setting and wildlife exhibits

How much does it cost?

Early bird price $349

$130 pre-conference labs

Extra discount Announce2017 $249

Special discounts for government employees or group discount

cfsummit (at) adobe.com

Easy to get low priced plane tickets to Las Vegas including Southwest

How many years has CF Summit been running?

5 years!

What is new this year?

New venue

New CF content

More hands on lab workshops  

4 tracks, 40 sessions

Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about

Charlie Arehart What is new in CF 10, 11 and 2016 that you didn’t know about

Brian Klass AWS and CF, auto scaling

Adobe Engineers behinds the scenes of CF 2018 features

Nolan Erck Aguilar.js and CF

The Special Event this year?

Thursday night Casino view + free drinks event at restaurant

No loud band

Other things you can do in Vegas?

Stay over the weekend after the event for fun

Bring your spouse and kids

Casinos

Big Shows -

Mystère by Cirque du Soleil.

Michael Jackson ONE by Cirque du Soleil.

LOVE Cirque du Soleil.

O

Le Rêve - The Dream.

Pitbull - Time Of Our Lives.

Blue Man Group at Luxor.

Criss Angel MINDFREAK LIVE! ...

KÀ by Cirque du Soleil.

Criss Angel MINDFREAK LIVE!

David Copperfield

Penn & Teller

Piff the Magic Dragon Show

Boyz II Men

Britney: Piece of Me

Carlos Santana

Céline Dion

Donny & Marie

Elton John The Million Dollar Piano

Jennifer Lopez ALL I HAVE

Reba, Brooks & Dunn

Tenors of Rock

The Righteous Brothers

Wayne Newton: Up Close and Personal

World Famous Gospel Brunch at House of Blues

Amazing locations

Venetian gondolas

Bellagio fountains

Great restaurants and bars from simple to swanky

Why are you proud to be involved in CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

CF Summit

More CF training

What are you looking forward to at CF Summit?

Mentioned in this episode

Las Vegas show 

CFObjective Conference

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Elishia Dvorak 

Elishia is the Technical marketing manager for ColdFusion. She started out as a CF developer.

Links

CFSummit

Questions: cfsummit (at) adobe.com

LinkedIn

Twitter 

Adobe blogs

Elishia (at) adobe.com

Interview transcript

Michael:       Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Elishia Dvorak from Adobe and she is the technical marketing manager for cold fusion and in charge of C.F. summit and we're going to talk today everything about CFSummit that you need to know. And we're going to look at what exactly C.F. summit is and why it is so important to the cold fusion community. Why every cold fusion developer should be going to this and we’ll also look at the technical details of when it is, where it is, how much it costs, special discounts. We’ll look at what's new this year and we’ll be revealing for the first time the speakers and topics of just being announced real soon now that Elishia is excited about. And also a little sneak peek info on the special event this year. So, welcome Elishia.

Elishia:         Thank you Michael and thanks for having me and hello everyone, nice to virtually meet you and talk with you today. I'm really excited about cold fusion summit this year. So, really excited to get into the detail and what you know about it.

Michael:       Great! So for those people probably a few percent of people listening don't know what cold fusion summit is but let's make sure everyone knows what it is.

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And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Brad Wood talks about “Design Patterns for amazing app architecture (16 patterns)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

He is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference, a system architect for Ortus Solution and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI.

Show notes

What is a design pattern?

Why should you be using them in your projects?

Commons solutions to common problems

Becoming a better software craftsman

Architect better apps

Command box 2-day training

Extending Command box

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Patterns to talk about

Builder

Object pool

Singleton

Strategy

Composite

Decorator

Facade

Front controller

Chain of responsibility

Memento

Observer (publish/subscribe)

Double checked locking

Anti-patterns

Anemic domain model

God object

Premature optimization

Readable, clear, concise code first

Then only optimize code pieces that are slow

Improbability factor

Honorable mentions

Law of demeter

Not too many dots in lines of code for class use

Too many dots make you dotty

Principle of least astonishment

Brook’s Law

Mentioned in this episode

Design patterns

book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published in 1994 by the so-called "Gang of Four"

Code Complete is a software development book, written by Steve McConnell

Book Mythical Man Month by Albert Brooks

Command box training

Sean Corfield article on Anemic domain model in the ColdFusion Quarterly

Cyclomatic complexity

Code smell

MVC

WORM = Write Once, Read Many code

FusionReactor auto profiler

Jenkins run time test recording

Command box 3.7 directory watchers

Testbox code coverage (with FusionReactor)

Travis CI

Docker

Docker Swarm

Forgebox

DevOps Best Practices

CFconfig app

Lucee CFML

Book Uncle Bob’s clean code

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Brad Wood

Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors.

Brad has been programming ColdFusion since 2001 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server. Brad is the ColdBox Platform developer advocate at Ortus Solutions and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI.

Links

CFML slack box channel

Twitter

brad

* WWIT= What Would It Take?

Interview transcript

Michael:            Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brad Wood and he is the amazing application system architect for Ortus Solutions as well as being evangelist for many of their Box products. Today, we’re going to be talking about design patterns so you can have amazing architecture in your apps and there's a whole bunch of patterns we're going to look at. We’re going to look at just in case you’ve been asleep for the last 20 years and missed what a design pattern was and how it affects coding. We’re going to look at that and why you should be using them and how they can be common solutions to common problems and help you produce better code in less time.

                            In fact, generally, just become better software craftsman and architect apps better. Also, we'll briefly look into the CommandBox two-day training that Brad is doing before the cfObjective conference. He's giving a talk on design patterns at cfObjective which is only weeks away now so, very excited for that. Welcome Brad.

Brad Wood:     Thank you, Michael.

Michael:            Just for folks who don't know, what is design pattern and I'm assuming it's nothing to do with design and Photoshop and all that, It's all to do with coding.

Read more

 

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Carol Hamilton talks about “Behind the scenes at cfObjective” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

She is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference and the cf.Objective Co-chairperson content advisory board and steering committee.

Show notes

Hot Speakers this year

New topic this year

New Location

Discounted govt rate and one day option

Her role in the conference

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Mentioned in this episode

Speakers http://www.cfobjective.com/speakers/

Schedule http://www.cfobjective.com/schedule/

Register http://www.cfobjective.com/register/

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Carol Hamilton

Carol is the cf.Objective Co-chairperson content advisory board and steering committee. She helps pick the venue, does marketing, advertising, and has been meeting every week for nearly a year to make the conference the best one yet.

When she is not busy on the conference she is a super mom and developer

Links

Twitter

Interview transcript

Michael:                        Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Carol Hamilton, and she is gonna talk about some of the behind the scene's info at this year's CF Objective. We're gonna look at some of the exciting speakers at the conference, some of the topics coming up that are interesting, and talk about the location, which has changed since last year. There's also some interesting options available this year that weren't available in prior year objectives. We'll talk about Carol's role in how putting CF Objective together.

                                            So welcome, Carol.

Carol Hamilton:              Hey, thanks for having me.

Michael:                        So what are the speakers that you are interested in this year? I know you're involved in helping pick the speakers, so you probably know everything about all the speakers.

Carol Hamilton:              Yeah, I guess that's the problem with asking me that is that I do know all the speakers and I get to know them pretty well working with them over the year, over multiple years, seeing them around. So I mean, I'm not gonna be able to pick a favorite but I would have to say I'm super excited to see Mark Usher back. Did you ever get to see Mark Usher around when you were around?

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Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers.

Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey.

Join the CF Alive revolution

Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today.

Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos

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Contribute to the CF Alive revolution

Connect with other CF developers and managers

There is no cost to membership.

Mary Jo Sminkey talks about “Advanced Error Handling Strategies for ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

She is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference and a long-time ColdFusion developer, having worked with CF since the Allaire days, and for many years she authored and sold one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for the language, CFWebstore. Today she works for CFWebtools as a Senior Developer, continuing to support and build large eCommerce websites.

Show notes

Why every CFer should be doing error logging

CF error logging

Global Error Handler

Capturing Different Scopes

Preventing unwieldy numbers of error emails

Logging to capture larger amounts of data vs. emailing all errors

Tracking User Actions

Per user history of pages accessed held in session scope

Shopping cart contents

User account info

JS/Ajax error logging

Ajax tracker in user session

Track Ajax request parameters

Log Ajax response and/or success

SQL Server error logging

Stored procedures errors

Log table to log SP params and info

Unexpected NULL values

Strategies for debugging errors on live sites

Variety of open source and 3rd party solutions for error logging

Using site analytics to track and fix issues on their live sites

404 errors

301 redirects

Log events in analytics

Search results events

Full Stack Application performance management tools

Full user interactions tracking

Reporting on performance too

All in one place

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year?

More developer outreach to bring in new developers - we are still developing it, cool new features

What are you looking forward to at CFObjective?

Mentioned in this episode

Mary Jo’s full custom CF error handler

Only emailing on unique errors

Bugsnag - with REST API collector, Javascript collector, subscribe to bug, track as fixed, renotify if it comes back, bug high level alerts, searchable by customer IP

BuglogHQ - open source CF tool

FusionReactor for slow CF pages and SQL queries

Source maps for minified production JS code

CodeKit (for Mac)

Jenkins build server

JSON structure saved to server and displayed with JSON viewer

Solr search

Browser Hawk

CFLOG

Logbox

Dynatrace

Cisco Appdynamics

Listen to the Audio

 

Bio

Mary Jo Sminkey

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Jo is a long-time ColdFusion developer, having worked with CF since the Allaire days, and for many years she authored and sold one of the most popular ecommerce platforms for the language, CFWebstore. Today she works for CFWebtools as a Senior Developer, continuing to support and build large ecommerce websites. In her spare time, she enjoys a wide variety of hobbies, including dog training and showing, sewing, knitting, board gaming, origami, handbell choir and other musical pursuits, and is a reviewer for Amazon products via their Vine program. She is a cancer survivor and suffers from fibromyalgia as well as various RSI issues from years of computer work so encourages young developers to pay attention to their ergonomics and learning how to ensure a healthy work environment. She enjoys cosplaying and attending conventions and runs a Facebook group for Cosplay with Disabilities which helps advocate and support people who cosplay with disabilities and the challenges that entails.  

Links

CFWebtools blog

Twitter

Facebook

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michael:                            Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mary Jo Sminkey, and she is speaking at cf.Objective() on advanced error handling strategies for ColdFusion, JavaScript and SQL Server. We're gonna be looking in this episode, why everyone listening should be doing error logging, what is ... you can do for ColdFusion error logging, but JavaScript, and Ajax error logging, and SQL Server error logging.

                                            Strategies you can use for debugging errors on a live site. We'll look at some open source and third party solutions for error logging, and how you can use site analytics to track and fix issues on a live site. Also, we'll look at some full stack application performance management tools you may not have used yet that are really handy. So, welcome Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Sminkey:         Hi Mike!

Michael:                            Hey, so let's start off with the 64,000 pound elephant in the room because I bet not everyone listening is doing error logging, and why should they be doing it?

Mary Jo Sminkey:         Well, basically when you get customers from emails, from your ... Sorry from your customers, or your clients, usually they have absolutely no detail. They just say your website sucks, it's broken, I can't check out. They give you no detail at all. If you've ever tried to get some details from your customers, it usually fails miserably. My goal has always been how can I get enough information about what's happening for the users on the website that I can debug those errors without having to ask them for help because they are going to be absolutely no help at all.

                                            In old days, a lot of us would just check ColdFusion error logs, or email the CF error dump to ourselves. Our applications have gotten a lot more complicated. There's a lot more components to it, so this is often not enough information. My goal has been to continually, gradually, incrementally improve what I'm doing for my, not just my error logging, but the way I notify myself of errors, what's included in that information, and how I can collect enough information about what's going on that I can figure out what the problem is, and fix it.

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And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.