One of the challenges of having a long commute to work is finding new and interesting ways to make the morning and evening drives more interesting. Over the last year I have found the perfect answer by subscribing to podcasts that I am interested in, which have also served to advance my own personal development and education. Much of my professional work involves programming large databases backed web systems using the Adobe ColdFusion. Last summer I discovered CFHour, which is a weekly ColdFusion podcast available for free subscription through iTunes or directly downloadable at their website CFHour.com.
CFHour is presented each week by Dave Ferguson and Michael Sean Becker. Dave Ferguson brings many years of back-end software development and management experience to the podcast, while Michael Sean Becker’s strengths lie in interface design and client-side systems development. Both Dave and Michael provide insight and updates on the latest happenings in the ColdFusion community. Each week new and interesting topics are discussed and the balance of humor and information make this both an entertaining and educational podcast. Over the past year, CFHour has hosted many interviews with people such as Adam Lehman (Product Manager for ColdFusion at Adobe), and many other key people in the ColdFusion and open source community. The podcast provided extensive coverage of the Adobe MAX conference last year, where Dave Ferguson presented at one of the sessions.
When I first started looking for programming podcasts, I realized there many available covering different languages, however very few that were solely aimed at ColdFusion. CFHour was the only ColdFusion podcast I was able to find at the time that was still actively publishing episodes. I went back and listened from the beginning where I have learned about very important subject areas such as current ColdFusion frameworks, Object Relational Mappers (ORM), programming techniques dos and don’ts, coverage of conferences, extensive reviews and coverage of new releases of ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder. The podcast also provides a lot of information on the open source ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) engines, which I knew nothing about until I started listening to the show.
If you are a web developer who uses ColdFusion, you owe it to yourself to check out this podcast. For more information please be sure to visit CFHour for a listing of the latest episodes available for download.
