Today is "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day per Steve Bryant's call . It's simply a day designated for us all to tell, well, how we got started in ColdFusion. So, here goes.

My story is probably a bit different that most of the other CF Developer's stories, at least the ones I've read anyway. When I got into ColdFusion I didn't have any type of computer experience or college degrees (at least not IT related, anyway). In fact, some might say it was the opposite. I had gone to college some, but after getting my Associates degree in Criminal Justice I decided not to pursue that any further and went back to work on the family farm in south Georgia.

I liked technology, I was surrounded by it every day. (You'd be surprised at how much tech. is involved in farming, we had GPS controlled equipment back in the mid 1990's.) I had a Windows 95 PC at the house that I liked to play with, and AOL dial-up was my gateway to the world! My Grandmother, who had lived and worked on the farm all of her life, saw my interest in computers and encouraged me to follow it. She didn't want me to have to work on the farm forever, so she offered to pay for me to take some certification courses that a local university was offering at night.

Originally, I wanted to get my MCSE certification. I don't even think that I knew what that was a the time, other than it was a Microsoft certification that I knew would probably help me get a job in IT. The MCSE course was not scheduled to start for a few more months, but they were also offering their own Certified Internet Webmaster course. Again, I really didn't know what that was, but it was an IT certification that I could get while waiting to start my MCSE, so I signed up. The more certifications you have, the better you are, right?

The course they offered was really well done. We learned to code html by hand, had a couple of graphics classes, played around with JavaScript a little bit, and had two ColdFusion classes where we built small applications from scratch using CF 4.0 and CF Studio. I had never heard of ColdFusion before (or html, for that matter), but it was fun and I liked how it allowed you to do things you couldn't do in html. I also remember thinking that, while it was neat that you could connect to Access and pull info from it, no one would really have a use for that on a real world website.

Shortly after completing that course, I got a job at a local ISP as their webmaster (I really hate that term, btw). To this day I'm convinced that the only reason they hired me was because I must have been the only one that applied. That, and the fact that I was willing to work for $8.50 an hour. It didn't take long for me to learn that all of that CF/database connection stuff was important. I was at that company for about 3 years where I evolved rapidly and got a ton of experience in stuff like general networking, web servers, SQL Server, and of course ColdFusion. From there I went to a company who almost doubled my salary to be their CF guy, and for me it's been a steady progression upwards ever since.

How about you? What's your CF story?