When I was thirteen I sent an email to Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds.com) telling him I wanted to make my own website with Coldfusion (which I had learned about through a pirated copy of DreamWeaver) and MySQL, and asked if would help me make it. [1]
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
My job entails me writing mostly Coldfusion all day long.
I write new code in Coldfusion script. Its syntax heavily inspired by javascript, right down to the optional terminating semicolon.
I still have to support a fair bit of code written in Coldfusion tag syntax. That I dislike especially given the code base was written by amateur developers and just makes me feel like bad php from 2003.
Oh I am very familiar with Coldfusion. My first job after dropping out of college [1] was doing Flash and Coldfusion work for a Martial Arts management company.
I have very mixed feeling on the language as a whole, both the tag and script language, though they’re mostly negative nowadays. I joined the CFML Slack a few months ago, which I was surprised to find, and the people on there were very nice and I respected their passion for the platform, but I personally still find the language pretty irritating, even with the scripty version.
Granted, I am very removed from web stuff now, and mostly work in data-land.
[1] I have a degree now, but that came considerably later.
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.