What have I been up to lately?

So, a lot of people have noticed and commented to me about dropping off the face of the world (from a CF Community point of view), so I thought I'd explain what I've been up to. As I've mentioned a few times in posts recently, my priorities in life definitely have changed since my son was born. He's put what's really important in life into perspective for me, which has definitely had a lot to do with how quiet I've been for a while.

I should begin by mentioning that I haven't at all stopped supporting the community, I've just been doing it more at user groups, classrooms, and client sites than anywhere else. I find that in these outlets, the audience is more appreciative, information is conveyed in a more useful manner, and I don't have to deal with what can only be described as the "ridiculous political atmosphere" that tends to accompany more open forums in the development community.

Getting back to my original point: what have I been up to, professionally?

Well, first of all, I've taken the role of CTO at Nylon Technology very seriously and am trying to rise to that challenge. There are some technical challenges of course, but my greatest challenges are in growing as an executive and manager. What's particularly difficult sometimes is "letting go of the code"... something I'll write about in detail another time.

I have been doing a decent amount of internal development at Nylon to support our internal and commercial needs. I find this particularly exciting, as it's given me to develop things I've always wanted to... and most importantly HOW I've always wanted to. There is a definite possibility that we will be releasing some of this code to the public.

To grow as a developer as well as to be the best CTO I can be at Nylon Technology, I've also been spending more time with technologies other than CF. We are definitely largely a CF shop, but also do quite a fair bit of PHP and Flash (rich multimedia projects). I've also taught myself Powershell which, by it's nature, included learning much more about the .NET Framework. I'm still not a huge .NET fan, but Powershell itself is one of the coolest languages I've ever seen. Reminded me a lot of LISP in many ways, with some strong parallels to perl and python and even CF... and some nice new nuances of its own, of course. If you are into programming/scripting languages and/or are looking for the best way to administer Windows networks and machines, definitely check out Powershell.

I'm in the process of building a decent sized Flex talent pool in-house, and we've done several Flex projects and prototypes. We're also getting started on what, by my estimation, is definitely the most high profile project that I've ever worked on and, in all likelihood, will be the most high profile project on the web built entirely with Flex and CF. I can't say anything more about that at the moment, but it is very high profile and the contract has been signed, so you'll definitely hear more about it in the future. I can't wait to talk about that!

I've also built new development and staging environments at Nylon, complete with source control and a web-based server admin and project-build (deployment) interface created by yours truly. This is part of a slow introduction of new development methodologies and project management policies and procedures.

Yes, I've been busy... and what I've said here only scratches the surface. More to come (much more) including, among other things, my thoughts about the future of ColdFusion.