ColdFusion Muse

The Muse on the Radio

I was privileged to appear on a local radio show called "Success in Action" on Saturday March 25th). The host is popular local business Coach Jim Barger. He works for "Action Coach" - an organization with which I was unfamiliar. But I found his low key approach (devoid of the usual Rah-Rah marketing hype) refreshing, and he had many insightful comments for me both on and off the air. The show explores strategies for successful business growth. It was fun and exciting to be able to talk about where we have been and where we are going. Check it out.

Email Follies - How to Make E-friends and Influence E-people

Note - this is not a technical post. It's strictly intended to make people laugh or at least chuckle. And for the record I like cats.

In a recent meeting with a group of mad guitar players (meaning they have a high skill level - not that they are angry) it was suggested that I write a quick post on email etiquette for posterity. Going around the circle it became clear that each of these "normal users" - that's how us tech types think of everyone else - had stories of emails that were unintentionally vague, ambiguous, redundant and also said the same thing twice. So I thought I'd put my pen to paper so to speak and try to give my take on the proper use of email.

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Web Sockets - Going Where No Muse Has Gone Before

You might wonder where I've been holed up for more than a month. Never fear - I'm still slogging away. My current project is a dashboard for CF Webtools that tracks all of our consulting activity. CF Webtools runs a custom tracking and management system as a core component of our business. This system has many cool features that have evolved over the years for tracking hours, performance, tasks, groups of tasks, assignments, productivity, estimates, deadlines etc. Myself and my VP, Jason Herbolsheimer (a brilliant programmer and manager who you would all know and love if he would ever blog), have spent thousands of hours on it to make it fit our business model of transparency, measurable productivity and cash positive block hours.

The reports and features it contains are useful, but a bit of a hodgepodge. Meanwhile, over time my role has changed considerably. Other than troubleshooting, mentoring and experimentation I'm not involved in day to day tasks directly with our clients any more. But I still monitor our overall productivity closely. Indeed, now that I'm a step back from the work I have a much better sense of what we are accomplishing and where our weak spots are. In the past I have used cfcharts called up on internal pages to show hours and individual developer performance but 3 things had changed.

1. We now have many more developers to track (29 at last count).
2. With 3000+ consulting hours per month the system receives a constant stream of updates, notes etc.
3. I have a fancy new set up with 3x27 inch monitors plus a 46 inch wall mounted monitor that looked lonely and I wanted some fancy-pants dashboard to display

Ok, that last reason is simple hubris but still, it was good enough to boot me down the path. But I had some decisions to make.

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