TurtleFusion

It seems to me that most people do think that the 'grass is greener on the other side' when it comes to many aspects of life, including that of the world of Cold Fusion and the developers who live within it's realm.  To help me perhaps avoid the pitfalls of this type of 'self pitying' (I'm a great self pitier - any more skill gained in this area and I might have to teach classes for the greater community), I thought I'd start this blog to reach out and find others opinions to balance my own, and to try to stop my feeling of isolation that I do tend to suffer from in my current job.

In my current job I have two primary duties - one which is financially related and the other is that of web developer.  Basically I've been workign with CF for the last six years and have had some success with building and maintaining certain web applications for my company with very little formal training and various amounts of support.  Because these programs tend to follow me to my new job locations I often find myself bringing these applications online and developing them to suit the needs of the new site where I am at.  This does not bother me as much as the fact that here, I am almost the lone developer with any real amount of experience, and since the development challenge ahead of me is one of the biggest I have faced, I must admit I feel somewhat isolated.

 I have been lucky enough to have been given support as far as formal training goes for the first time in my career and recently attended the Adobe 'Advanced Cold Fusion' Course, which I found very interesting and am about to attend a Flex 2 training class in just under two weeks.  The frustration here is the lack of new developers being trained.  We have a live application that is running off - hold your breath - CF 4.0 - okay breathe now. (I've actually tried to keep holding my breath to hope each time I pass out and awaken that it's all been a bad dream and we're not actually this far behind the times, but all I get is a nasty bang on the head and a splitting headache).  This application is going to be upgraded to either CFMX (for certain) or CF7.0 if I can sell them on it.  Also they are running it with Access as it's database of which I'm trying to sell the upgrade to SQL 2005.  If funds are available it should be no problem but it would still be helpful to have at least another developer online.

Not to tell a lie, but I do have one in the works who is attending the Fastrack to Cold Fusion class at the moment and is getting into the application development with me but it's a slow process.  Maybe I have nothing to complain about but it does seem that there isn't a lot of new blood entering the CF univerise at the moment.  Or maybe people just don't like working with me......