I've heard from quite a few programmers who are interested in putting their toe in the RoR waters. It is a big step -- and to make that as non-stressful as possible, I'm going to hold a free two-hour online "Intro to Ruby on Rails for ColdFusion Programmers" training on September 22 from 12.30 to 2.30 Eastern US time.

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Recently, I read Ben Nadel's post of his thoughts stimulated by a book that we both seem to be reading, Drive by Daniel Pink. Ben is thinking about the best way of compensating workers. It's a great read with lots of comments. It reminded me of how I stumbled into something that I had pretty much forgotten about -- and I wonder if it would work in a different context.

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Most of you will be familiar with blogger extraordinaire Ben Nadel. Ben recently posted about a fundamental misunderstanding he had about jQuery event objects. There's something very important to be learned about how Ben approaches problems.

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For an upcoming, large job, I did a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats". It's a formalized way of assessing both the business opportunity and one's abilities to leverage the opportunity. (Sorry for the market-speak...) SWOT is helpful in thinking realistically about one's strengths and weaknesses -- and it is a more formal way of doing something that I've undertaken for years with clients: the pre post-mortem.

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A recent article in "The Business Insider" here reveals some of the questions Google uses to interview applicants. Google's smart, right? So, we should emulate Google?

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Recently, I was reading a post about how Perl blew it (here-- and why it's lost its viability as a web language for new projects. Many of the comments were savage in their response. Yet, ask any non-Perl person and I think they'd agree that Perl no longer has the luster for writing web apps it once did. Given that, why the extreme reaction to what seems a fairly obvious point?

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I spoke with a friend recently who told me that his company had just hired another programmer to keep up with the work. Good problem. Bad solution.

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Malcolm Gladwell is a fabulously successful journalist. He's written blockbuster books: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What The Dog Saw. I find them both interesting and entertaining. Gladwell delivers a product that provides value and he's reaped the appropriate rewards. A heartwarming tale of success, no? Not so fast, grasshopper...

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Since I announced that I was going to do future development with Ruby on Rails, I've received some email asking "Is ColdFusion really dead then?" CF developers have been hearing this for years, but I started thinking about the question itself.

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Well, this is a hard post to write. After months of investigating, soul-searching, and examining, I've decided to move future application development to Ruby On Rails.

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