Steve Bryant came up with the idea to, on August 1st, post a blog entry on How I Got Started in ColdFusion. So I will do just that.

My story is much like many of yours. It starts with a boy who wanted to be an astronaut (ok, so not all boys want to be astronauts), found a computer, and became hooked by the idea that by telling it to do something, in a certain way, it would simply do it.

My “career” in software engineering started with a lowly TI-99 4a from Texas Instruments. This machine featured 16K of RAM, a tape drive for “recording” my programs, and a cartridge drive I rarely used. This was later replaced by a Commodore 64, which was twice the machine! Using code from books and magazines (no internet yet), at the age of 14, I was learning to program. My friends called me a nerd because I learned how to draw a stick-man on the screen, and made him move.

It started on those computers with BASIC. On later, PC-based machines I followed suit with QBASIC, then moving on to Pascal and C/C++. C++ I liked a lot, while Pascal has remained “unfriended” for a long time. :)

I was hooked, and knew that I wanted to do this all the time! After a few years of “service” in tech support, MSN, Microsoft, Road Runner to name a few, I finally got my break. A company in Dallas was looking for a C++ programmer for internal applications. I applied for the job, though having no real world experience, and somehow I landed the job. I was in way over my head, but did manage to squeeze out a few programs before I, and a few others, was laid off.

A little later down the road I had found myself imaging old computers for resale in a warehouse where I had to work with an old label printer. For some odd reason it took two different programs, and a lot of steps to work this old printer. So, being the good programmer I wanted to be, I automated it in a little C++ application. My boss took notice of this and told his Senior Programmer about it.

At the time this Senior Programmer was building an e-commerce application for them, and he needed some help. So he approched me asking if I had ever done any programming in ColdFusion. I had never heard of it, and had only dabbled in ASP-classic once before. I told the guy I’d figure it out. So I went to work learning ColdFusion 6.0 MX.

From there I’ve programming applications, both web and desktop, in many languages, some favorites being PHP, Groovy, Java, and C#. But to this day CFML and ColdFusion is the language that keeps me productive in both my day job, and my side projects.