111 CFCasts Behind the Scenes with Eric Peterson

Eric Peterson talks about “CFCasts Behind the Scenes” in this episode of the CF Alive Podcast, with host Michaela Light.

Show notes

What is CFCasts

• Netflix for ColdFusion
• Free and paid levels

Why should every CFer check out CFCasts

• CFML-based tutorials
• Full-stack content (CFML, JavaScript, Databases, etc.)
• Free! (and Paid)

Why we built CFCasts

• “Netflix for CFML Developers”
• Screencasts for CF
• History
  • LaraCasts.com - PHP / Laravel
  • CFCasts domain registered in 2014
• Why has it not got Box in the name, like all the other Ortus products?
  • We already had the domain. ;-)
• When was it launched?
  • 2020 - Record all ITB videos and wanted to sell them (virtual conference)
    • Part Virtual event due to covid
  • Whole Ortus team helps created the content, along with other CF experts

 Stats

• 343 Videos
• 23 Series
• 500+ accounts plus more viewers not logged
• English and Spanish Localization

Content

• Box vs other CF
• ITB Videos
• Object-Oriented Programming course by Nolan Erck
• ColdBox Workshop
• Code samples for workshops in Git repos

How we built CFCasts

• ColdBox
• Lucee
• InertiaJS
• VueJS
• MySQL
• Vimeo
• Stripe
• Responsible design - works on phone, tablet, desktop
• Tailwind CSS and Tailwind UI

Future features

• Video page redesign better UX
• Refactoring to ElasticSearch, more filters and search results
  • From MySQL text search

Why are you proud to use CF?

• Lots of innovations in the CF space
• Lots of the world runs on CF
  • More sites in CF than BuiltWith etc shows due to intranets and modern coding practices

WWIT to make CF more alive this year?

• Learn new CF features and tools
• BuiltWithCFBox Git repo

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

• In Person
• Workshops
• September 27-30
• New Location?

Mentioned in this episode

• ForgeBox.io
• CFCasts
• MySQL
• InertiaJS
• TailwindUI
• Into The Box

Bio

Eric Peterson

Eric Peterson is a CFML and Javascript developer at Ortus Solutions (ColdBox, CommandBox, etc.). He attended the University of Utah and received a degree in Information Systems thinking he would hate programming as a career. He started programming in CFML (and in general) in 2012 and has never been more happy to be proved wrong. He is the current maintainer of qb, Quick, and ColdBox Elixir as well as a prolific module author on ForgeBox.io. He loves creating tools to help bring CFML up to date with other modern languages and communities.

In his free time, Eric loves to participate in theater, musicals, and to spend time with his wife, three children, and one dog. He can be found on Twitter at @_elpete.

Links

• Twitter
• GitHub @elpete

 

Interview Transcript

Michaela Light 26:24
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Eric Peterson. And we're talking about CF casts behind the scenes. We're going to learn what is in CF casts all the cool ColdFusion stuff in there, why He created it, and some other interesting stuff in ColdFusion land and CF casts. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Peterson 26:55
Hey, thanks for having me. You're welcome.

Michaela Light 26:58
And for those of you don't know, Eric is a CFML. And JavaScript developer, he works at audit solutions. And you know, the guys who make all those box products, among many other things, and they also make CF costs, which is probably why we're talking and I'm surprised to learn Eric, though you did an Information Systems degree, thinking you thought you would hate programming.

Eric Peterson 27:23
Yeah, I did. Especially after my first programming course, in college. I just, it was, I don't know, it just wasn't, it didn't click. I remember, it was a Java course. And all I was doing was sticking things out in the console. And I thought, well, this is kind of boring. And I remember jumping forward to like, we made the game, but I don't remember how any of the code worked. It was just like, edit this one section of the class. And it just didn't click. But uh, but when I graduated and got into a job, there was some web development in it. And I guess having a goal, something to build that people were going to use me that made it much more exciting. So

Michaela Light 28:07
and you were programming in ColdFusion. In that job, it sounds like, Yeah,

Eric Peterson 28:10
we were a team, we call ourselves shadow IT. Because the supply chain that the company had hired myself along with a few other people to do it projects for them that didn't have to kind of go through the rest of the company prioritization. And so we got to choose our own our own tech and things. And before I got there, actually, they had chosen cold fusion because the head hurt, it was easy to get up and running for people who had, let's say, didn't have a formal computer science background.

Michaela Light 28:44
Mm hmm. So you came from the dark side of Java and information technology, not but it's really dark. And then you got into the light with ColdFusion, and JavaScript and all the cool stuff. So it's really interesting. And I hear you've written one or two modules in forge walks.

Eric Peterson 29:10
Yes, that's kind of how I got my introduction to order. This is when I discovered command box called box, that whole ecosystem. I love to see the idea of being able to share reusable code in this way. It seems at the time that the more popular at least programming languages or fruit or frameworks, I'll have this concept so I was glad to see it exist in the ColdFusion world and started putting things in there because I it wasn't a node and NPM there aren't millions of packages, you know, there was definite needs. So started filling those and keep Oh, thank god

Michaela Light 29:57
yeah, well, thank you for for all the help From the whole ColdFusion community for writing those packages, helping promote it, because that definitely saves a lot of people a lot of work. So. But let's talk today about CF cos, maybe we should stop because I think some people listening don't even know CF cos exist, or we've even heard the name, they're not quite clear what the heck it is. So is it like, another command box is it you know, what's up?

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