Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

Last two days I have been working in ColdFusion. This is the the second time in my life that I’m writing CFML.

A little over a couple of years ago, I was using a spreadsheet to track the work assignments to my team. It was cumbersome: others couldn’t see how I had assigned the work, when I was expecting what from whom, what the priorities were, and at times when the work load was high even exactly what was needed to be delivered.

With Deepak helping me out whenever I truly got stuck I wrote a basic application that all my team members could access. It had different user levels so that only I could assign work and a few other little bits that were non-standard back then. Since the application was running on a local server, load times were instantaneous and I didn’t have to worry about a lot of things. I did it over a few nights (totalling two working days I believe). Over the next few days after I let my team on it, I kept making small changes to help make things clear so that I would not have to provide information that I could put beforehand in the work list.

Then I stopped.

There weren’t many CF coders in our office so when I wanted some advanced stuff added, I had to get it re-done in PHP. Since the benefits of the application were very visible, I got the developer time easily. A few other teams tried it out to see if they could manage their work with it too. That was flattering.

Anyhow, back to topic.

Our time tracking system is written in CFML/MSSQL and hasn’t really seen many updates recently. The reports generated are no longer suited to our current needs. Though we are able to take things forward this way or that way since the data is there, it’s a pretty time-consuming way to do things.

Therefore, last two days I have been working on learning SQL and trying to remember the basics of CFML. And just as last time, at the end of second day, I have my first report ready.

It is still as fun as it was last time.