First off, huge kudos and thanx to Dan Wilson, Jim Priest and the entire TACFUG crew who put on this event! It was well organized (especially for a first attempt) and I’d rate the content - and the networking - right up there with some of the best ColdFusion conferences I’ve attended. The fact that it was free did not mean that quality suffered at all - well done to all those involved!

After a smooth and well-staffed registration process, Adam Lehman presented his opening “not a keynote” talk, pointing out that he was technically on vacation and it was a bit odd doing a keynote-style talk now that ColdFusion 9 has actually been released! He covered a lot of ground in a nice, relaxed style that went over well with the crowd (which included quite a few folks for whom this was all news anyway).

On day two, Joe Rinehart opened with an “inspirational” keynote-style piece based loosely on his CFUnited keynote. He explained why he’d fallen in love with ColdFusion and then drifted away and how he’d recently fallen in love all over again, this time with the community and what they’d shown ColdFusion is capable of. It was a good, upbeat talk that also went over well with the crowd.

Sessions proper started at 10am both days with three different tracks on Saturday (CF / RIA / General) and two CF tracks on Sunday, along with a RIA track. On top of all that, Saturday also saw two full-day hands-on courses on ColdFusion and Flex (run by Josh Adams and Andy Powell respectively). A great idea that added even more value to the conference!

I started off with Sam Farmer’s “One Liners” talk which showcased the power and expressiveness of CFML (with a number of CF9-specific examples). I’m in two minds about these sort of “tips and tricks” sessions because, by definition, they don’t go deep into a topic and they can be a bit of a scatter-gun in terms of learning something new and useful.

Next was Bob Silverberg’s two-part “CF9 Hibernate (ORM) Integration” session. It was well-paced and showed the convenience of this new feature and, as we progressed into the second hour after lunch, Bob went into a good level of detail about functionality and, more importantly, the traps into which the unwary can fall. Having worked with Hibernate, I knew about the transient-peristent-detached lifecycle of objects but seeing Bob spell this out so clearly, with diagrams and some excellent code examples, really brought home to me how easy it can be to trip over some of these issues. Hibernate is awesome and Adobe have done a great job making it approachable and easy-to-use but it’s also a bit of loaded gun so mind your extremities when you’re using it! The second hour - the “Advanced Techniques” portion - was one of the highlights of the conference for me, in terms of learning new things.

Although I would probably have learned more from either Adrian Pomilio’s “Flex & JavaScript” or Shane Trahan’s “Managing Large File Transfers” talks, I decided to go with the high entertainment value of Simon Free’s “Intro to CF Builder” session. I really can’t say enough good things about Simon’s style of presenting! His talks are well-structured and his delivery is very engaging and downright laugh-out-loud entertaining at times, especially as he’s leaping around in front of the projector screen drawing your attention to specific things on his slides!

After the break, I switched to the RIA track for Brian Kotek’s “Swiz” talk. I’ve seen Chris Scott present on this framework a couple of times and I picked up something new each time. Brian’s talk was equally illuminating, clearly explaining the benefits of Swiz and showing how productive it can make you.

My final Saturday session was Michael Labriola’s “Next Generation Testing” which covered Flex Unit 4. I was absolutely blown away by some of what he’s doing with this testing framework (with @Theory and @DataPoint annotations driving combinatoric automated testing). It made me even more excited about unit testing and I’d love to see some of this percolate into MXUnit.

My “ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape” presentation was in the first slot on Sunday (PDF 544K) and it seemed to go well, both time-wise and from an audience reception point of view. I’d been a bit nervous about it because (a) I’d been asked to create this talk specifically for CFinNC and (b) I’d struggled to pull it together and actually only finished it at 9:30pm the night before! Thank you to everyone who said nice things about my talk! I ended up in deep hallway conversations about open source software after the talk and then it was lunch time.

After lunch, I picked Brian Kotek’s “Object-Oriented Design Principles” talk which covered a number of solid guidelines for designing objects and their interactions (Single Responsibility, Don’t Repeat Yourself, Open-Closed and so on). Lots of good concepts, presented with good examples.

Closing out the conference for me was Paul Cormier’s “ExtJS 3″ session which opened my eyes as to just how sophisticated that framework is as well as how little server side code is needed for some fairly impressive apps (and just how much client side code is needed!). Paul covered a lot of ground and came up to me afterward and asked for my feedback (I said it was a good preso but suggested breaking up the slides with a few small demos so it wasn’t quite so overwhelming).

Overall then, extremely high quality content. I learned some new stuff and I was entertained. All for free. Amazing! Here’s hoping that Dan and the team can figure out how to do this again next year!

In addition to the technical side of things, the social side of CFinNC was also very good. On Friday night I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Joe Rinehart and Liz Frederik (now of Adobe). It was great to catch up with my former Broadchoice colleague and it was also great to hear Liz be so enthusiastic about Adobe and the community - I’m looking forward to seeing what changes and improvements she can effect at Adobe (even though I’m no longer part of the “inner circle” now that I work for Railo). We ate at The Pit which is a fabulous BBQ place with some of my favorite food (my wife jokes I’m a Southern boy at heart because I love sweet potatoes, grits and all sorts of food from the South

Saturday evening the conference team had organized an event at the much-praised Mosquito club (which I had to skip - I needed to finish my preso!) and it sounded like folks had a lot of fun there. And then there was the Global Toast right next to the Sheraton hotel which became our after hours home with a constant stream of good, cheap beer!

I’d love to see more user groups attempt free/cheap weekend conferences like this. It’s clear that there’s an audience - and it’s equally clear there’s a pool of speakers who will support events like this too. Take the challenge - see if your user group wants to take it on - and talk to Liz at Adobe because I’m sure she’d love to help you make it a success!

Comments

If you look around at great open source applications (MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Apache, OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox etc), they all have a few things in common:

• A dedicated team of developers - and documentation authors and testers and so on
• An organization that helps with project logistics, community management, marketing and so on
• Financial support of some form - usually in terms of sponsorship for infrastructure, sometimes in terms of actually paying people to work on the project

In the CF community, we have none of these. A handful of open source projects have a small team of developers, rather than being just a lone developer. Some projects have infrastructure (e.g., Trac/SVN) donated by a company - and that includes RIAForge and any of the source code hosting companies that offer free plans for open source projects.

What if an organization existed to help open source CFML projects grow? What if that organization could offer infrastructure, assistance with project logistics and marketing, and could help marshal volunteers to encourage better documentation and testing and so on?

That’s the idea behind the For ColdFusion Foundation. 4CFF was announced at CFUnited as a incorporated, non-profit organization with a board of directors in place and a set of bylaws based on the Apache Foundation. The goal of 4CFF is:

The For ColdFusion Foundation (4CFF) is a non-profit dedicated to helping the ColdFusion Community at-large through fostering a collaborative environment for ColdFusion Free Open-Source Software Projects and their Developer Communities, so that we all may enjoy great software.

Since CFUnited, 4CFF has been working on logistics and is close to announcing the first two open source projects that will be moving under the 4CFF umbrella. It’s early days for the foundation but you can read more about the concepts behind it and the people involved on the 4CFF website and you can follow announcements on Twitter. You can join the foundation’s free membership mailing list or send your thoughts to the foundation, via the 4CFF website.

If you’re at MAX, quite a few of the board will be there and you can ask your questions in person. Look for the Space Chimps!

Comments

CFunited 2009 was awesome!

OK, you probably want a bit more detail than that so read on.

I really can’t say enough good things about the location. The Lansdowne Resort was a beautiful location, it had great rooms, amazing food - and snacks and drinks were available all day, every day! - incredibly helpful staff and a good bar. The conference area was great and, again, the staff were very helpful, ensuring that speakers had everything they needed and that any technical problems were resolved quickly (and they knew about Adobe Acrobat Connect too - impressive!). Because of the great location, the atmosphere was very upbeat - it managed to feel both like a vacation and and a deeply immersive technical conference.

What about the conference content? I went to more sessions this year than ever before at CFUnited so that speaks volumes about the content. When the schedule had first started to appear, I thought I would have a hard time filling my time but gradually new sessions were added, repeats were added and before I knew were I was, I had something planned for every slot - even tho’, as usual, I didn’t get to everything I’d planned. The highlights were as I’d expected: Adam Haskell’s “Red Green Refactor”, Joe Rinehart’s day two keynote and Cameron Childress’ Subversion talk (I didn’t get to Todd’s 2.0 Startup talk but I was very glad to see SlideSix spoken of so highly throughout the conference). Peter Bell’s requirements and estimating talk was an unexpected highlight too (unexpected because I’d planned to go to a different talk and changed my mind at the last minute).

Ray Camden’s “What’s Next?” iPhone web application was a great help, always being able to pull up whatever the current / next sessions at any time was so useful.

The Stellr team did a terrific job and CFUnited 2010 is already in motion with registration open (so soon - at such a discount!) so we can expect another great conference next year!

The other overdue blog post on my Things to-do list covers what it was like to be a sponsor at CFUnited. A first for me (sort of). I’ve been attending (and speaking) at CFUnited since it was CFUN’04 (when I covered the use of Mach-II at Macromedia). Sure, Macromedia and Adobe have been regular sponsors but that is the ColdFusion product team and I was going independently as part of another team - the joys of a big company - so I never felt I was a sponsor (I never worked for the ColdFusion product team - even tho’ a lot of people seem to think I did!). This year - 2009 - Railo was a silver sponsor of CFUnited and so I spent quite a bit of time around the Railo “booth” talking to attendees.

I will admit that I was surprised by how many people hadn’t heard of us at all! Even tho’ I keep saying it - that CFUnited’s attendance represents only 0.1% of the CF developer base - it’s still a shock to realize that the biggest CFML conference in world dwarfs what we like to think of as “the community” based on blogs and Twitter (cfbloggers aggregates 533 blogs and an even smaller number of the community are well-known on Twitter).

The upside was that I got to speak to a lot of people new to Railo. They heard about us mostly through Joe Rinehart’s inspirational day two keynote - thank you Joe! - but also through just seeing our booth or attending Gert’s presentation on the open source Railo server (or presentations by Mark Drew, Peter Bell and myself, I guess, since we all mention our employer!).

The number one question I was asked: “Really? I can run my CFML applications on Railo for FREE?” With my background in Unix/Linux and over two decades of writing free open source software, I still find it puzzling - and a little disturbing - that people don’t really believe there are free solutions out there for many problems…

What really surprised me tho’ was how many people came up and were bemoaning a departmental - or, worse, corporate - mandate to move to free and/or open source software and therefore away from their beloved ColdFusion. One guy told me that his department were faced with rewriting all their CFML code in PHP because they had to move to free open source software. Naturally he was delighted to find that he could keep his CFML developers and his CFML code and still move to a free open source system! This happened over and over again. Sometimes it was Java, occasionally it was Ruby on Rails, mostly it was PHP. And of course there were also the “free as in beer” .NET mandates - “we already run Windows so .NET is free and we shouldn’t have to pay to deploy our web applications”. Guess what? You don’t have to abandon CFML to run your web applications for free.

That was pretty uplifting overall. It vindicated what I’ve always said about Railo (and it’s true about Open BlueDragon too): instead of leaving CFML for some free / open source alternative, why not keep your CFML code, keep your CFML developers and just use a free open source CFML engine instead? If Adobe were already losing a customer, better to keep them using CFML than lose them to another technology, surely? Well, that’s my point of view, and CFUnited reinforced that.

Free as in beer? So I mentioned .NET as being free as in beer. If you’re a Windows shop, you’ve bought your licenses and .NET deployment is free. Sure, Visual Studio costs money but there are no production licenses above and beyond your Windows systems. It’s a common argument against ColdFusion in the Windows space and Microsoft makes great play on this point. ColdFusion development is free as in beer too, of course, but deployment to shared development and testing servers will cost you money (although I think Adam Lehman would like to change that - which would be a huge win for all ColdFusion developers).

Railo is free as in beer too, of course. You can download it for free - even for production. You can buy support if you like (just like you can with Adobe).

Railo is also free as in speech. You can run Railo for anything you want (freedom 0). You can download the source and inspect it (freedom 1). Under the LGPLv2 license you can redistribute copies of Railo (freedom 2) and you can create enhancements and bug fixes and freely distribute those too (freedom 3).

You can also repackage Railo with your commercial application and make money out of it without paying Railo a dime - something you can’t do with Adobe ColdFusion or Open BlueDragon. That’s why we chose LGPLv2 instead of GPL. There’s a spectrum of open source licenses and in some ways you could put GPL on one end and ASL2 (Apache Source License 2.0) on the other - they control what you can do with the source code in terms of distribution. GPL is restrictive: anything you build based on GPL code must also be GPL code (OpenBD lets you run your CFML on top but you mustn’t modify OpenBD without releasing those modifications as GPL). ASL2 is the opposite: you can essentially do whatever you want with the code, commercially or otherwise, as long as you acknowledge the original copyright. I release all my personal projects under ASL2: I don’t care, just credit me. LGPLv2 is fairly permissive: you can build closed source commercial systems on top of it but modifications to the original open source code must remain LGPLv2.

I got a little off-topic there but I hope you found the free vs open source discussion useful? The bottom line is that CFUnited was a great experience and was also great exposure for Railo and I think it opened many people’s eyes as to what is possible. If you’re being forced to move away from Adobe ColdFusion because of some free and/or open source mandate, you don’t have to leave CFML behind - Railo can help you. If you love CFML but have projects that don’t include a budget to buy Adobe licenses, Railo can help you (of course we sure wish you had budget for support - but the community mailing list is full of free support too). At the end of the day, the CFML community grows stronger by having more choices and the ability to use CFML on more projects.

Comments

Ok, that doesn’t require much imagination, I know. We know that Flash Builder will make our lives somewhat easier when it finally ships, but in the meantime your boss doesn’t allow you to run beta software so what does one do besides coming to work for me? And maybe, just maybe, your boss is really mean (unlike myself) and won’t even pay out for a license of Charles. So now what?

I present to you . It’s a little tag tat does wonders to your Flex Builder 3 Console, and I don’t know why it isn’t being promoted much more. I’ve been using it for quite a while, and while I do not recall how I discovered it I am sure it’s never too late to tell the world all about it.

So what does TraceTarget do? In a nutshell it outputs a ton of logging information into your Console when you debug your Flex project, and in particular it tells you a lot about the Remoting calls that you are undoubtedly making. Here’s an example of my current project, first without TraceTarget added:

[SWF] Users:stefan:Documents:dev:flex:fb3:demo:bin-debug:index.swf - 1,379,424 bytes after decompression
result getUserDetails

Yeah, nothing basically besides one trace that I out in there to signal the return from CF. Now let’s add to the main.mxml file and debug the app again:

[SWF] Users:stefan:Documents:dev:flex:fb3:demo:bin-debug:index.swf - 1,383,632 bytes after decompression
‘9670B130-68C5-3D75-D251-3D30C4A99F2E’ producer set destination to ‘ColdFusion’.
‘F2AF48B3-896A-FA9D-D77A-3D30C4AF2A71′ producer set destination to ‘ColdFusion’.
‘8495032E-7DE7-49B1-124E-3D30C4EB0643′ producer set destination to ‘ColdFusion’.
‘8495032E-7DE7-49B1-124E-3D30C4EB0643′ producer sending message ‘17E7B79A-6D4E-21C3-4F67-3D30C4EE538F’
‘my-cfamf’ channel endpoint set to http://www.demo.com/flex2gateway/
‘my-cfamf’ channel settings are:
<channel id=”my-cfamf” type=”mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel”>
<endpoint uri=”http://www.demo.com/flex2gateway/“/>
<properties>
<polling-enabled>false</polling-enabled>
</properties>
</channel>
‘my-cfamf’ pinging endpoint.
‘my-cfamf’ channel is connected.
‘my-cfamf’ channel sending message:
(mx.messaging.messages::RemotingMessage)#0
body = (Array)#1
[0] “abcd”
clientId = (null)
destination = “ColdFusion”
headers = (Object)#2
messageId = “17E7B79A-6D4E-21C3-4F67-3D30C4EE538F”
operation = “getRoomDetails”
source = “api.v1.private.rooms”
timestamp = 0
timeToLive = 0
‘8495032E-7DE7-49B1-124E-3D30C4EB0643′ producer connected.
‘8495032E-7DE7-49B1-124E-3D30C4EB0643′ producer acknowledge of ‘17E7B79A-6D4E-21C3-4F67-3D30C4EE538F’.
1
‘9670B130-68C5-3D75-D251-3D30C4A99F2E’ producer sending message ‘01B287E5-5EF5-1B40-75EE-3D30C648A026′
‘9670B130-68C5-3D75-D251-3D30C4A99F2E’ producer connected.
‘my-cfamf’ channel sending message:
(mx.messaging.messages::RemotingMessage)#0
body = (Array)#1
clientId = (null)
destination = “ColdFusion”
headers = (Object)#2
messageId = “01B287E5-5EF5-1B40-75EE-3D30C648A026″
operation = “getUserDetails”
source = “api.v1.private.users”
timestamp = 0
timeToLive = 0
‘9670B130-68C5-3D75-D251-3D30C4A99F2E’ producer acknowledge of ‘01B287E5-5EF5-1B40-75EE-3D30C648A026′.
result getUserDetails

Pretty cool, right? You can read more about TraceTarget and other logging frameworks here. But if you just want a quick and dirty way to see some more debug info on your Remoting calls then you could do worse than simply sticking the TraceTarget tag into your main.mxml file and save yourself some hassle. It may not be as slick as Charles or the upcoming Network Monitor but it can be handy nevertheless. Have fun coding.

Comments

I’ll be collecting my thoughts later today and writing up a (very long) blog entry about my experiences at the conference.

In the meantime, thank you speakers for the great sessions, thank you attendees for all those discussions in hallways - and the bar! - and thank you especially Liz, Nafisa and the rest of the Stellr team for an awesome event!

Comments

For folks who’ve been reluctant to run pre-release software on a production server, this is the build you’ve been waiting for

I was so busy as CFUnited I didn’t get around to upgrading my blog or local development server until five minutes ago. As usual, the update was fast and smooth!

Comments

I’m afraid I never liked HomeSite / ColdFusion Studio.

I tried them when I first joined Macromedia in 2000 but they just didn’t work for me. Mind you, I didn’t think much of Dreamweaver either (back in the 2.0 days). I used to be an Emacs / vi kinda guy due to my Linux / C / C++ background I guess and GUI-style IDEs just weren’t my thing.

After I joined Macromedia, I gradually settled into Dreamweaver but I never loved it. It was competent. UltraDev 4 was a high point for me and then, as Dreamweaver evolved and grew fat / feature-rich, I switched to jEdit for a while (because DW on the Mac, frankly, sucked ass in 2002!). Of course, DW improved and became usable again (and then with DW7 the Mac was shafted again for a while and then things improved).

jEdit showed me a glimpse of what a CFML IDE could be tho’ and a couple of years later there were not one but two Eclipse-based CFML IDEs: CFEclipse and He3. The latter has long-since departed this earth but CFEclipse lives on with my colleague Mark Drew at the helm. Over time, CFEclipse became my preferred CFML IDE. I liked the plugins, I liked the overall feel of Eclipse (color me weird but it’s true).

This year, however, after a short stint on the ColdFusion Builder prerelease program (when it was still called Bolt), I found myself using TextMate more and more. Yes, it’s Mac-only but it’s lightweight and has plugins (bundles) for a lot of different languages. If you want a simple CFML editor, I can highly recommend TextMate with one of the CFML bundles.

Why? I was a bit underwhelmed with the first cuts of Bolt but I wanted to try something different, something not based on Eclipse.

I’m still using Eclipse for anything Java-related of course, including building Railo from source, as well as any Flex work I do, using Flex Builder 3.

And now ColdFusion Builder has been released as a public beta. Adobe have done a fantastic job with it - it’s night and day compared to the early builds I tried. I already have Flex Builder 3 and Subclipse installed on top of ColdFusion Builder and it’s quickly become my preferred CFML IDE. I’ll blog more about ColdFusion Builder over the next few months but I can definitely imagine paying up to $199 for it. My only real gripe is that it relies on RDS for a number of things and, of course, RDS is proprietary and therefore if you’re working with Railo or OpenBD, certain features are denied you. The ability to write (and run) IDE extensions using CFML is a masterstroke! Yes, the ColdFusion Builder extensions run with Railo as your default server but you get a warning that your server isn’t running every time which is annoying (because it uses RDS to determine whether a server is up or not). Hopefully that will change before launch (i.e., the warning will go away!).

Adobe haven’t exactly hidden that ColdFusion Builder is based on Eclipse and yet the default setup still feels very reasonable. It also feels a lot less bloated than Eclipse can sometimes feel with, generally, good startup and response times. If you haven’t already downloaded ColdFusion Builder and taken it for a serious test drive, you owe it to yourself to do so.

So what about CFEclipse? Well, it’s not dead and it’s not likely to die. No matter how good ColdFusion Builder becomes, there are always going to be people who won’t pay for a CFML IDE and for them CFEclipse will remain a great choice. There are things that CFEclipse has/does that are not part of ColdFusion Builder too which may sway you (such as the methods view which I have always relied on heavily) and the frameworks explorer.

Comments

CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn’t mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec.

I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed “core” by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

The first enhancement is to allow assignments to be chained. This is common in many C-like languages because an assignment is an expression and the value of that expression is the value assigned. This, and the ability to var-declare several variables at once, will be part of CFML2009:

This is already supported in Railo 3.1. I’m not sure about Open BlueDragon’s handling of this.

Next up is the ternary operator (booleanExpression ? trueValue : falseValue) which is also common in C-like languages. This was adopted as part of CFML2009 during the committee’s early voting on expressions even tho’, at the time, only Railo supported it.

Ben talks about struct and array literals which were introduced in ColdFusion 8 but only for simple assignments. In the CFML2009 spec, these will be first class expressions and therefore usable everywhere:

This is already supported in Railo 3.1. Open BlueDragon has this on their roadmap for 1.4.

CFML2009 will add a <cfcontinue> tag to match the continue keyword in CFSCRIPT (an odd case of CFSCRIPT having a feature that was not present as a tag). Railo 3.1 and Open BlueDragon 1.1 already have this tag.

CFML2009 adds finally (and <cffinally>) which Railo 3.1 already supports. Open BlueDragon’s roadmap shows this scheduled for 2.0.

CFML2009 specifies a lot of enhancements to function declarations in CFSCRIPT, including the ability to specify return types, access specifiers and so on. Railo 3.1 allows you to specify argument types and defaults (covered in this blog post) but full support for components as CFSCRIPT is coming in ColdFusion 9 (and is on the roadmap for Railo, probably 3.2 later this year, and Open BlueDragon 2.0 because these are core language features).

Ben mentions several new operators in CFSCRIPT that match existing tags (e.g., abort) and these will all be part of core language in CFML2009 and therefore on every vendor’s roadmap, with ColdFusion 9 the first to implement them. Being able to use throw in CFSCRIPT will be a huge step forward in my opinion!

Ben also says that “You can invoke any tags and functions in CFSCRIPT” and this is an area that the Advisory Committee have been struggling with. I blogged about our deliberations here and here to show how difficult it has been to reach consensus on a way to do this. In fact, the committee still hasn’t completed voting on this particular set of issues (with two committee members not yet voting). It’s a very difficult problem to solve and it’s very difficult to obtain consensus on some of these issues. The committee meets again tomorrow and this will be on the agenda!

When Ben visited BACFUG, he mentioned there would be a <cfimap> tag in ColdFusion 9. This is also something that the Advisory Committee had agreed should be part of the core language but the two implementations so far (Railo and Open BlueDragon) have some different attributes and it’s possible (likely!) that Adobe’s implementation in ColdFusion 9 will be different from both existing implementations. As the committee works through all the function arguments and tag attributes, we have to try to resolve these differences to reach consensus on which attributes are core language, which are extended core and which are vendor-specific.

It’s great to see CFML moving forward with all three vendors tracking the upcoming CFML2009 spec. I think CFUnited is going to be a very interesting conference with a lot of announcements and a lot of information about where CFML is headed and where all three vendors are focusing their efforts!

Comments

What he’s mostly talking about are those open reqs that you keep seeing, month on month, that never seem to get filled, but he is also asking why well-qualified people have a hard time getting hired. He doesn’t really answer his own question but he gives some good advice about applying for jobs…

• If the job requirements are specific, ensure your resume makes it clear you really have those skills.
• Keep your resume current and if the application says “attach an up-to-date resume” then make sure it is current and attach it to your response! I’m guilty: I tend to send folks a link to my online resume which is generic, not tailored to a specific job.
• If the application asks for your salary expectations, be reasonable but never undervalue yourself.
• The cover letter is the first impression you make - and may be your only impression! Judith provides good advice in the middle of Michael’s post.
• If the application asks for a code sample, send them something appropriate to the job (although I’ve not actually seen an application that requests this - and most code is proprietary and belongs to an employer/client unless you write a lot of open source stuff!).

I’ve definitely seen some of these perpetually open job requirements. I’ve talked to the companies posting them. Their two most common responses?

1. “We get lots of applicants but they aren’t the right people.”
2. “Almost no one has applied for that job.”

The second one I can understand when the application reads like an encyclopedia of “required” skills (which many of them are). I’ve looked at job openings and thought yes, yes, yes, er… gosh, no, hmm… yes, yes, nope… really? They require that skill? It’s part of the problem with “laundry list” job requirements - and yet it’s needed to help filter the flood of applications that many jobs might otherwise get. It’s why Michael recommends you tweak your resume to “match” the job requirements.

What about the first response? I know lots of “right people” but they are mostly very happy in their current workplace and aren’t interested in applying for another job. In fact, when Broadchoice wanted to hire people, we drew up a shortlist of people we’d like to hire and then simply asked them to join us! It’s a tactic I highly recommend. You might get turned down but you might not. The important thing here is not to think “I can’t have X - they’d never come to work for us!” because that will stop you going after the people you really want. Go on, just ask them!

So let’s go back to part of Michael’s question where he asks “why can’t I get a ColdFusion job?” and let me assume he’s asking specifically for himself and people like him, by which I mean “well-known people in the community”. Why would a company not hire a “Community Expert” (to use Adobe’s term for a select band of several hundred of the top-notch developers / designers in each product user base)? Part of the problem is our level of involvement in the community - we attend and speak at a lot of conferences, we seem to spend a huge amount of time blogging, answering posts on mailing lists, writing open source software and twittering. Given all that, how can we possibly have time for a full-time job? The conferences alone are a huge issue for many companies. I’ve had interviews where one of the first questions out of my prospective employer’s mouth is “do you expect to continue attending several conferences a year if we hire you?”. I’ve also actually been asked “do you really have time for a full-time job with all the community work you do?”.

There’s also the aspect of “fit” with the team. If the company is looking for even a senior level developer to work in a team, they probably want someone who will work happily with their peers and code like a demon. Companies are wary of “Community Experts” because they fear those folks will want to change things, to “educate” the other developers, to introduce “new” technology and processes, to agitate for training and conference attendance. Heck, such outspoken people might even challenge management itself in trying to “improve” the way a company’s software gets built! That can definitely work against the more outspoken members of our community.

So, if you have thoughts on this subject, drop your thoughts on Michael’s blog!

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