When Andrew asked me to share, I was honoured.  Andrew accesses very cool people in business and tech, and asks them the deeper questions we all wonder about. Luckily, I was only doing a “how-to” interview, haha.

I hope my contribution of information furthers what Andrew is working to put out there. I can’t recall picking a Mixergy interview to watch and being disappointed. It’s quality stuff.

One skillset that I’ve learnt and and continued to develop over the last 12 years is systemizing and automating things in businesses.  I hope you enjoy it and future posts on systemizing and automating in a business.

http://mixergy.com/jas-panesar-damaag-interview/

So much writing.  Documenting.  Trying it out.  Make sure it works.

It’s seems easier and faster just to do it yourself, right?

In your business, is it your job to do everyone else’s job?   Or is it your job to help figure out how to best do something?

Take a look at your actions.  We go off figuring out the latest item we need to get running smoothly for ourselves.  We want to make our own lives easier.  So you decide to document it, scribble down some notes, and know that in a few months you’ll have enough to go back on.  Bask in satisfaction of a job well done.  Kind of.

Are you really finished? Or did you just systemize a process into being more efficient for just yourself, and not for your business?  Don’t know what I mean?  Systemize yourself so you can pass your expertise into your business to become systemized, and run that one thing without you.

Every single item you systemize is a step towards having one of those dream businesses that runs without the owner. In those businesses, the owner is free to work on growing the business, instead of working in the business just to satisfy the day-to-day needs of that business.  Sound familiar?  It does for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bricks and mortar business, consulting, or an internet startup.

Think about it this way:  Isn’t doing something yourself, over, and over,  no matter how much you’ve made it easier for yourself, incredibly repetitive?  So boring?  Actually a waste of your time?  Don’t have time to work on the new things that excite you and you love?

By not systemizing, or only doing it enough for yourself, are you creating more boring and repetitive and dreadful tasks for yourself?  Isn’t that worse than systemizing beyond yourself?

Remember that what you find repetitive and boring today was likely a challenge and something new once.  You were figuring it out for the first time, with fresh eyes, not so long ago.  There’s one important step after, though.

When it keeps coming up to take your time, ask yourself, “Am I done with figuring this out?  Do I need to be doing this? Should I be moving onto the next thing to figure out?”

By the time you’re doing it over and over and not thinking about it, it means you’ve probably figured out enough to get someone else on it.  Good job.  Now be a friend to your future self and your future business.

It’s time to double your investment of figuring it out the first time.  Interested?

Empower someone else in your organization to do it.  Don’t have anyone?  Get a virtual assistant.  Seriously.

Take the accomplishment of figuring out how to do something efficiently and get someone else doing it exactly as you do it, with the understanding of why you do it that way.

What should you commit to today?  Make that list of things that you need to systemize. Things only you know how to do.  Things only someone else knows how to do.  It might be scary.  You won’t have the answers for all of them, that’s okay.  You just need to know what you’re looking at, so you can have something to work at.

Not sure of how your list will turn out?  It’s okay, I’ll share one in a future post and you can compare how well you actually will end up doing.

Start making a list!

That dream doesn’t always happen as we plan.  An undisciplined business can take over every non-business area of your life if it’s left to carve it’s own path.  A new business is a new born and it needs constant attention and feeding and direction.  I learnt that first hand in the early days of my freelancing/contracting career around 1999-2004 before I made myself see my work for what it needed to be: A business first.  My time since has been spent getting better at it every time something goes how I don’t want it to.

Let’s agree on one thing before exploring it from this perspective.

What is a business?  Something that creates value and can run without us.

We don’t own a business until it can run without us.  Until then we own a job we can’t quit because it cant run without us, and we’re too invested to easily quit or change.

Yeah, it kind of sucks to see it that black and white.  Look around.  Everything doesn’t move as it should, without you.  You can’t breathe.  You think about it morning, noon and night.  Everything stays in your head all the time and you just wish someone else could “get it” like you do.

There’s an idea out there I agree with.  Get your time on running the business, not working in the business.  This is kind of tough because normally we started off a business because we could “do it better”.  Quite often things do take off great by doing it better, but we can’t seem to make the jump beyond us.

Your time is a waste in your business if you’re not replacing yourself.  It’s a baby that will never grow up or live it’s dreams out for you.

There is a need to take a leap, from what we do regularly ourselves, and helping others around us do it in that same way.  It seems like it’s not possible, or a dream.  But it is possible.  It takes discipline and commitment, those two qualities we think we have buckets of, but not when it comes to systemizing, documenting and setting up our business to teach it ourselves.

We confuse activity with results. We see our discipline as commitment as “Look at how hard  I work”.  I now see discipline and commitment as “Look at how much I help make happen with others.”  No matter how good or talented I could be for a microsecond, once in life, I might hit a 10x or 20x productivity of an average person.

When you systemize correctly, 1 + 1 always equals 11. The best way to systemize is to take the items that are repetitive and tedious to you and get them documented.  Document them in a way that anyone can pick them up, and get faster at them after doing them a few times.  Explain the “why” of why you do it the way you do, before you explain what the steps are.  Recognize this will be a forever evolving document, capturing the history of how your business grew up and became better, every, single, day.

Systemizing does not limit you, it helps enable others to help free you to innovate. Sometimes we wonder how others are able to connect and get their teams working together in a way that they can do what’s needed, how it’s needed.  This comes from a clear, disciplined communication of how things are supposed to happen.

Systemizing frees you, it doesn’t lock you up. Entrepreneurs want to innovate and create with reckless abandon and creativity.  We all love it.  The reality of making payroll and paying the bills can seem dreadful in comparison.  Both are critical to master though, and systemization lets the most critical parts of your business (keeping the cash flow going) get systemized and run without you so you can find and do the next great thing to create value, get setup, and systemize eventually.

How can one start systemizing their business?

First, understand you’ll be learning forever. Your documentation and system may also evolve forever.  Realizing this will help you remember that it’s really about capturing how to get things done in your business in small piece-meals.  I have some strategies that have worked for me below.

Systemize what you know. Leave the unknowns blank until you get to them. Systemizing can seem like I have to know everything about my business before I write something.  The reality is this.  No entrepreneur ever started in a business knowing everything.  If you haven’t systemized yet, you still have to learn.  How could you have a complete document?

Systemize repeatedly. Once I accepted that systemizing was something I’d be working at forever, it made it easier.  Instead of a doomy, gloomy, how will I get all of this done kind of mindset, I decided I was just going to start with a point form outline of my business, and start filling it in how I knew.  It’s easy to be disciplined and committed in little steps than for big efforts.  When someone sends you an email, send back a long one, explaining why you do it the way you do it, and how.  Then, copy and paste it into your systemization docs as a first draft.  It’s better than nothing.

At first, systemize as conversation. You are not writing a scientific paper.  You’re writing a document for people to actually use, and read and improve.  The world will not see this.  It’s about doing great things with your team. Document the systems and processes of your business in conversational language that’s still professional, but doesn’t sound like you at all.   The easier it’s written and explained, the easier it is to read, understand, remember, and implement. I promise when you have enough there, it will become structured and polished on it’s own and you’ll actually want to keep improving it.  But in the beginning, just start.

Systemize with every explanation. We’re an email obsessed world.  We think answering emails gets work done.  But it doesn’t really.  We’re just being the path of least resistance for someone to get their answer.  We’re being the system, instead of building a system where people can get and store the answers they need.

Take a moment, every time someone asks you something more than once. Every conversation you have, whether it’s in person, by phone or email, take a moment. Instead of making systemizing a big effort, take a moment to capture what you know well, and draft up an email and send it to that person.  Ask them to do it and get feedback if it explained how best to do it.  It might not got well.  That partially reflects on your ability to capture the why, and the how.  Keep at it, you will improve.

But I don’t want to write and type! Yeah, I get it. For example, when you don’t have time to write, but have a minute to point at something on your screen to someone to show them how to do something… you can record it!  No need to write up long procedures the first time.  Jing it up!  Jing allows you to create simple, up to 5 minute videos for free. All you do is record and it uploads it to a secure space on the internet, and you can simply store the link to the video in your wiki, or reply to a multi-step explanation with an email.   I hope to show more examples of this in the future.

Store the why/how centrally, in a wiki. Learn what a wiki is. If you want to be in business in the 21st century, and like being hip with your Blackberry, learn what a wiki is.  It has the power to change your life.  A wiki is just a bunch of linked together word files, or web pages that you can hyper-quickly edit and maintain amongst a group of people.  They are easily searchable.  It will forever keep a history of all the changes you made to it so you know what you’ve changed in your ways, and why.

Operationally, A wiki is a centrally accessible document that you can quickly link together many processes and keep editing them in one place in the open.  There’s no binders to update, it’s electronic, alive, and current.  Update it directly with the email explanations.  Have your wiki always open so when you send an email explaining something, you can copy and paste the explanation into a categorized description.  I’ll document this further in future posts.

Most importantly, be a kind friend to your future self. I say all the time, I’m not perfect.  I don’t say it to knock myself down, but to remind myself that I have the opportunity to be better.. a lot.  In a lot of ways I have noticed my attitude towards systemizing my business and life has been my attitude towards my perfection and how I manage it.  If I was worried about covering it up and hiding the fact that I don’t know everything, I’d be terrified of systemizing.  Instead, I acknowledge that I have some talents in creating value for customers.

My real daily challenge that I never back away from no matter how crazy it might seem. I see a little more each day that my real job is to systemizing how I create value for customers, so others can do it too.  I’m past needing to feel special about my own abilities.  My business isn’t about just me. It’s about all the lives it touches from those I work with, to those I work for, to those they serve.

Become an agent of self-empowerment a little more every day. Even though I work in technology, I see myself working in the field of empowerment, because technology is in the age of empowerment for the masses.  Whoever can get the best at enabling technology for people to solve their problems, will have a lot more wins.  When you systemize, you empower yourself to let your life grow into new areas. You can setup a structure so things can happen without you, so you can continue to innovate.  When you systemize, you empower others to build and grow on what you’re doing, how you want it done.

The tool I use to run my entire business. I use FogBugz and it’s built-in wiki because it ties together the requests in my business (internal and external) with the wiki of how we address those issues.  Other systems probably work, but FogBugz found me, changed my life and for now I don’t have a need for more.

It was pointed out to me today that there’s not a lot out of actionable information out there about how entrepreneurs can systemize their business.  More of a problem, entrepreneurs don’t know why they should keep systemizing a high priority.

I have some information on how to systemize and automate any business. It’s pretty good, I think.  I’ve tested and learnt it in retail, manufacturing, shipping/logistics, eServices, online businesses, in the professional (legal, accounting) worlds and more.  While it’s not perfect, nor am I, I know that it’s possible. That’s a pretty crazy thing to say for some. But, I’ve been thrown down a lot of wells too and learnt a lot and keep learning more every day.

Hear me out, let me know what you think, and test what I’m saying.  It’ll help me clarify it even more.  I’m in a place where I understand and welcome that I’ll be improving the systemization and automation in my life forever.

I’m going to answer one question in this post:

Why must you systemize as much as you email, breath, sleep and bathe?

Here’s the thing.

Your business will never grow if you don’t systemize it correctly.

If you haven’t clearly systemized your startup/business, automating your business will miss the mark.

That’s it. But that’s not enough for us.  It sure wasn’t for Jas 10 years ago.

Let me try it differently:

1. If you don’t want a business that grows today, or tomorrow, don’t systemize.
2. If you don’t want a system that can grow beyond you, don’t systemize.
3. You will never have a business that makes your life great and the lives of your customers and employees great if you don’t systemize.
4. You will always feel under the gun without systemization.
5. You will feel less under the gun with systemization.
6. Quite often, you will be able to turn the gun around with systemization.

Businesses who don’t systemize don’t want to succeed. Who ever got into wanting to do a business and not be succesful at it?  Who actually knew everything about running a business before becoming an entrepreneur?  Anyone who agrees with the last 2 points might not be completely truthful with themselves.

We all had a dream when we started a business. A dream of a certain way of living. Working. Creating. Enabling ourselves and others.  Quite often, it doesn’t go this way.  Our business takes up more and more of our time, and we have less and less of ourselves to give to the other things that are important to us, including family and friends. Pretty soon we’re all work.  I ended up working 7 days a week for 4-5 years with no real vacation (more than a day or two off, and certainly no further than 2-3 hour flight away).

Somewhere our business dream becomes our worst nightmare.  Instead of running a business, the business is running us.  Worse, it’s running our lives, and the lives of everyone in our life, because it drives and decides everything.  We don’t own a business. We own a job we can’t quit. Too far invested.  Can’t switch or the loss might be too great. So we plod on, thinking if we work harder, we’ll find a way out.  Sadly, the harder *we* work, we only seem to dig a deeper hole.  There’s even more to do.

Proper systemization solves all of this. The question is, are you up to the task to remove the obstacles within you and all of us to let this happen?

Before we get into HOW to systemize, we have to understand a few things.

WHY > HOW. Why to systemize is more important than HOW. There are hundreds if not thousands of tactics you can use to systemize your business.  The most important thing is deeply connecting with why systemizing (and trying out everything you can constantly) is important.  The how becomes easier when we believe in why we should do it and remember it.  If you get the how you will run out of ideas.  If you always center your life on why you do things, it will forever fuel finding HOW to do systemize your business constantly.

Systemizing is not Automating. Systemizing is the act of getting a written, organized flowchart of your business with checklists and procedures for every position and task.  It’s a lot to undertake, but you start with the critical stuff first and work your way out.  Automating is making that system automatic.  Don’t prematurely automate, when you don’t have a clear process or system.  That will result in

Systemizing is improving your business 10-fold over.  Automating your systemization is a 100-fold improvement. If you don’t like those numbers, I guess you don’t care for your business to grow and run without you.

Systemization lets you get the work of many done. Don’t look for systematization or automation to replace staff.  Look for systematization to let you get 10 times as much done as your competitors with the same staff you have today.  Like?  I thought so.

Systemizing won’t let you replace people right away. People talk about replacing staff with automation.  That’s not a very light or easy thing to say.  If your business is really that poorly systemized that people are being the system instead of managing a system, that reflects very poorly on the business.  The experience customers can have will change greatly from one visit to the next.  You risk lifelong customers by rolling the dice.  You will always need people managing your system and business.  The more you can free them up to use their expertise to save and make you money by systemizing and automating further, the more of a friend you are being to yourself.

Systemizing is more important than anything you do in your business. It’s like a baby.  Feed it, it grows. Ignore it and it will suffer along with you eventually.  The more you avoid systemizing, the greater your growing pains will be if you grow your business first and worry about the rest later.  It’s possible to do both at the same time.

Systemizing is scaling. Even while you are figuring out how to do best things, there is zero reason it shouldn’t be documented somewhere it can be centrally found.  I use FogBugz for this, I find its a fantastic at letting me deal with things in general and specific details.

Systemizing is self-development. There is a way.  In the beginning it’s a little tough because it’s not hard, or tedious, but that it’s forcing you to spend your talents improving your own business instead of the business of your customers.

How is systemizing the solution?  Systemizing is the best discipline of your company. Wish everyone did it as well as you?  Well, learn it well enough to teach and explain it to someone else.  You can do it, because you’re so good at it.

Systemization is your dream apprentice, your best student, and will be the best teacher of your business. Systemization will record every lesson you’ve learnt and why.  It will always have forever ready “how we do this here”.  It will always be available for anyone to check 6 months after they forget and have to stumble through doing something again.

Systemization eliminates time wasting. You won’t waste time re-visiting what you learnt before.  Once you decide to do things a certain way, you write that down, and keep a history of WHY you chose that.  You will never re-hash old conversations and decisions unless there’s something new to discuss or consider.

Systemization is a discipline.  Creative discipline is the only way to success. The word discipline often leaves a feeling of “ew” in our minds and hearts.  Yet, I can’t help but say that the most successful people in my life, whether they are successful financially, professionally, academically, emotionally, mentally strong, physically in shape, emotionally mature and incredibly giving, or spiritually (or whatever leads them to be) so centered, is all because of a healthy discipline.

Systemization is the highest discipline resulting in the best result possible. Doing the right and best things every day, and improving how you do something all the time is the highest discipline.  Reading this post and doing nothing isn’t discipline.  Discipline is picking up a problem and solving it forever.  There’s a ton of problems to solve, but we have to agree, discipline, and success aren’t too far behind.

Systemizing serves you, not the other way around. In the beginning, it looks like systemizing is a lot of work.  But it’s not.  The purpose of systemizing your business is so that your business serves you, not the other way around.  The purpose of systemizing your business is so you can drive and steer your business to do great things for the world, not have your business steer your life where it needs.

Systemizing exists where success is. Seeing the successful people in our lives, we notice they have generally higher levels of discipline that allow their talent to increase.  So, sorry.  Discipline is king. And if we aren’t working on our discipline every, single, breath, we’re fooling ourselves.  Committment and discipline.  Learn to love those words.

Systemized businesses are for everyone. Not just McDonalds.  Every business, no matter how small, or not, can start reaping the rewards of systematization immediately. If we look at any successful business of any size, we’ll see the same thing. If you have a dream of a small business, it should be able to run with out you so you can tend to the rest of your life instead of leaving it to wither and suffer.

Systemized businesses last and grow. The ones that last, have a system of committment and discipline.  Some call it a procedures manual.  Some call it systemizing.  The important thing you need to understand is that systemizing your business, documenting it is sharing “this is how we do it here”.  And how we do it here is always improving and you better be okay with improving yourself all the time.

Systemizing is replicating yourself. We all wish wish we had 10 people just like us.  Well, that’s possible.  If you feel that only 20% of what you do is special/creative/talented, and the other 80% of your time is staying on top of details so they don’t get missed, that’s a sign for needing systemizing.

Systemizing replaces you. Instead of creating a system that other people can work with and improve, you are the system.  You are the business.  Micromanaging doesn’t work.  Every time we get mad at a team member for not “doing it right”, we should be mad that we didn’t document or train it ourselves.

Systemizing protects your business. People quit.  They leave, or they move up in your company.  Either way, they won’t do the same job for more than a couple of years.  You will forever have an issue of transferring “Why we do it this way” and “How we do it here”

If you don’t systemize your business, it will never grow. You can’t automate your business until you understand the system of your business and have a process running.  Systemization gives you one level of freedom from your business to work ON the business and grow it.  Automation is a second, exponential leap that helps a few peopel get the work of many done.

Know when to stop systemizing. When systemization gets tedious and you’re sick and tired of keeping up with the systemization, it works, but it’s inefficient.  It might be time to again take a sweep through automating what systems takes up the most time

Is this enough why?  Are you itching to say enough, I’m convinced, what can I actually do?

Are you willing to commit 5-10 minutes a day, or capture your existing ways so they can be systemized?

We know we should be documenting things. And systemizing.  We read about how good it is for us.  We bask in the sunshine of a sunny postcard.  But we don’t always do it.  So, we have a few choices.

1. Spend all our time trying to convince ourselves why we should do it, and after all that effort, hope that we remember it every days.
2. Realize that it’s important enough to hack into our habits.

I chose path 2.  I wrote enough of the above as a regular reminder but just started redirecting my ways, and life into emails.  For me that system was FogBugz, a central collection of everything in my life.  Whether it’s getting new business, doing the work for clients, or running/managing/improving the business, it collects everything. And I mean everything.

If it’s not in the system, it doesn’t exist.

Next, we’ll get into understanding how to start fitting systemization into your life.

One of the things I’m really liking about Mura is the number of very, very smart people who care about making Mura as easy and painless to use as possible to do amazing things.   Many are developers who are outside of Blue River and it’s a testament to the team behind Mura as well the codebase.

The long and short of it is this:  As we’re using the Mura FW/1 plugin template, and plugins in general, we’re seeing some places we could enhance and have some benefit.  One area is ensuring multiple Mura plugins can work and play side by side without little issue.

I had the chance to take part in a conversation with some of the Blue River team and a few of us heavy Mura Developers, and the result of that conversation was to implement a simple change to  the official Mura FW/1 Plugin.  There is a notable difference in the Mura FW/1 template moving forward  should you download it moving forward from today:  Instead of appending an ?action=CfcName.FunctionName, the action has been expanded to be [packagename]action=CFCname.FunctionName.

So, for example if I gave my plugin the unique package name of JasPlugin , the action name in the URL would be

?JasPluginAction=CFCName.FunctionName
 

Where might this impact you?  It shouldn’t as long as you use #buildUrl(subsystem:CFCName.FunctionName)# to generate your links.  If you don’t you will have to make sure you write out the url correctly.

Why was this change necessary?

One of the reasons is the Mura admin is written in FW/1 as well, and embedding FW/1 apps inside FW/1 apps can cause some confusion.  By having a unique action name by default for each plugin, the opportunity for a crossed signal is greatly eliminated.

Secondly, having a shared request context between plugins is also a potential issue for cross-contamination during a request.  This is also being worked on for a future update, but in the meantime, the above update will greatly help things.

What about existing plugins?

They should continue to work fine.  If you’d like to change them to be consistent with the current plugin, the update is a cinch.

If you open the root of your plugin folder up and edit fw1config.cfm

Change this line:

framework.action = 'action';

to something unique like:

framework.action = 'jaspluginaction';

Documentation?

Steve Withington, Manager of the Mura FW/1 plugin at BlueRiver has modified the github page to reflect this.  I suspect it will show up in documentation shortly but I thought I would put it here so it could be found as well.

I have updated my recent slides for Building Plugins Mura Plugins with FW/1 from MuraCon 2011 to reflect this like it was always the case.  Please feel free to hit me up or anyone on the Mura Forums.

So, you have a business.  Like any business, you need answers from every system in your business.  The funny part? Every business wants the same answer from their data.

Every system in every business constantly looks to answer one question.

WHERE IS EVERYTHING AT!?

That’s all anyone cares to know. On demand.  Get good at it and there’s a future for you.

When we systemize, we just want to get an answer. On Demand. Automatically.

Systemization hides the complexity of getting that answer under the covers, where a lot more goes on.

Automatically presenting this answer by systemizing is what I do as a Systems Integrator.  I first make it simple to use what you click and read.  Then under the covers, the complexity of what you do is busy working away for you 24/7.

If you’re looking for for meaty, applicable experience, here’s the first post in hopefully many.  If more software was built like this, or better, we wouldn’t have so much bad, time consuming, hard to use software.

MY LAW: WHY BEFORE HOW.

- If you don’t understand the data, you don’t understand the business. Find and learn the dots and how they connect.
- Be Datacentric. The data is actually the system. Software simply presents it.  No meaningful data, no meaningful system. Understand the data in each of it’s states and how it interacts, or find someone who can.
- People manage the system. The system manages the details. People should never be the tools or the system.  Use Virtual Assistants where software can’t do it until you find a way.
- Avoid premature systemization. If you don’t know your data and process inside out, you’ll rebuild and bypass incomplete systemization with manual processes anyways.

DISCUSS. DESIGN. DEVELOP. DELIVER. – How I systemize any business with a web-based tool:

- Listen before talking. Learn the customer’s business from their staff, and why they do things the way they do.
- Make checklists. All requests, responses. All the steps.  Have anyone do them.  Find the leaks and document.
- Map the checklists on a flowchart. Find what’s missing.
- Prioritize. Systemize most complex, time-consuming, profit eating checklists first.
- Timeline. Turn your prioritized list sideways and you have a timeline of what gets done first.  Apply dates.
- Build. Build the software to fit customer’s competitive advantage.  Don’t be an SAP dampener.
- Review, Improve, Repeat. See if it helped you get more done with less effort.  Build what you see based on new perspectives.

FOR ANYONE WHO THINKS SYSTEMIZING IS A WASTE - Why you must systemize:

- Get more done with less effort. Don’t push work onto someone else’s plate.  Systemization makes it easier for everyone.
- Monitor, notify and act. Get the computer to monitor, notify and take action as you find and define scenarios.  Bake it into the bread.
- People cost more than systems. The #1 cost in any business is time, of staff and customers. Let staff deal with people and solve problems, not computers.
- As your data increase, so do requests and needs of dataset. Manual can’t keep up.
- Maintain & Enhance your competitive advantage. Do it your way, not SAP’s (no offence). SAP just requires customization instead of doing it the SAP way.

Me: I’m a systems integrator. I systemized my customer’s businesses (SMB to enterprise) for 15 years before getting into products. Manufacturing, Legal, Shipping, Logistics, Retail, “eServices” and more.  Workflow management, Reporting, labelling, mobile, web, custom hardware, monitoring.

I presented two main Plugin topics for designers, developers and managers.

1. Why Plugins are important not just for you, but Mura,
2. How easy Plugins are to build for Mura using FW/1.

The MuraCon website will have slides posted soon, but I had received a few requests for them and promised them, so here they are.

Please note the demo coding videos I presented at MuraCon ended up being over 500 mb, I am planning on re-shooting them if possible.  In the meantime most of what I covered is available in Mura Show #47, which I also hosted so it should fit pretty well:

Let’s talk after the last presentation of the day is is over to get your plugin released and on github!

Base Mura FW/1 Plugin (links to the Mura Marketplace): http://bit.ly/mura-fw1-plugin

FW/1 Cheatsheet (links to FW/1 project on Github) : http://bit.ly/fw1cheatsheet

Submit your plugin to the Mura Marketplace (Links to getmura.com): http://bit.ly/submit-fw1-plugin

Last, but not least, release your plugin on github.com!

I’ll be posting my slides shortly as well, I want to see if I can find a way to share the embedded videos easily.

In writing this post it’s kind of funny looking back how all the dots have connected together in the past to have me at a keyboard this moment.  I was trying to avoid writing a background to it all but for some reason I feel it’s a more meaningful share if I do.  You can jump straight to “How ColdFusion Happened” if you’re more interested in that.

ColdFusion is the one community that I’m part of which has introduced me to developers who come from so many a diverse backgrounds.  Many were artists, designers, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, business folks, marketers, and more.  All needed to do something on the web.  They somehow started with ColdFusion and many became very proficient self-taught programmers.

I want to express my thanks to Adobe for keeping ColdFusion releasing and updating it, Macromedia for pushing what it could do with Flash, and Allaire for starting it all.  I’m also very happy that we have at least two very capable open source CFML engines in Railo and OpenBD for those so inclined.

Even though I have worked with over a dozen languages in the last 15 years in competent intimacy, and a world where people jump from one hot thing to the next, ColdFusion has stayed hyper-productive, relevant and really, really, good at building just for the web.  So relevant and hyper-productive that the community doesn’t do a very good job tooting it’s own horn because we’re so busy just building.  Where there’s less materials out there for working through problems.. I think it’s because most developers just don’t have as many when starting out with ColdFusion.  For the rest, we have all experienced the holy quinity of Ben Forta, Ray Camden, Sean Corfield and Ben Nadel.

I’d like to break this post into two parts, first the story of how I landed in tech and ColdFusion, and why I’ve found myself still primarily using it, despite the latest and greatest that seems to pop up or fade away every few years.

My Background.

I kind of had a weird childhood when it came to technology.  I always wanted a computer, but I didn’t get my own until I was about 14-15.  From the 8th grade onward I spent a lot of time in the computer labs at school getting my 10,000 hours in.  I had two teachers who shaped and mentored me incredibly in ways I found out many years later, secretly clearing the path for me to do a lot of things I had no business doing.  As teachers, they had a group of talented computer students who had the potential to make their life a living hell, so they did the unthinkable, they disarmed us with a little bit of respect and asked us to help them run the computer labs.  This meant we could play Doom II on the network, years before online gaming became so prevalent.

How it started.

Like most days, I was in the computer lab one day. Beside me sat down a nice guy in a suit and we started chatting.  It turned out he did the work on the teachers network that I wasn’t allowed to touch as a student.    Turns out he was the owner of a local VAR (Value Added Reseller) specializing in setting up networks and servicing them throughout the province.  Strangely, I was working on my resume ironically enough looking for a summer job.  He said he was looking for a summer student and gave me his card to call him when I was free in the summer.  It’s a tad unbelievable how one little meeting and conversation would set up the rest of my life.

Summer came, and I didn’t call. I didn’t think he was serious.  Who hires a student like that?  After a talking to by my father, I called half way into the summer to apologize for not calling them to let them know either way.  Surprisingly I got a “We’ve been waiting for you to call, we didn’t take your number!”   Odd.  The next day, I had a job.  A job that would incredibly fuel my experience first in IT, and then software for the next 5 years.

How ColdFusion happened.

Now, I had a job where the boss gave me his visa to buy the books I wanted to learn anything I wanted to. He bought every gadget when it came out, became bored of it in 2 weeks and put it on a shelf alowing employees to sign it out for their own use.  Even though it was 1996, I had a Palm Pilot, a Laptop and a ton of other gear I had no business having.  Since I learnt hardware, repairs, setting up servers, and networking, I was allowed to pull $10,000 servers from inventory to configure and play with them.  One day I got bored and started playing around with Netscape webserver. They didn’t just make a web browser, you know.  I was on the internet a lot more and wanted to see how I could publish my own pages.  Man, that would be sweet.  After setting up a server at work and getting a basic company website up, the next fall I setup a Netscape Web Server for the school’s website, and managed to convince my school and score my own dedicated 128k ISDN line to run this server.

Word spread I was the king of the spreadsheets and internets.  I ended up in touch with someone who wanted a website built. He was an avid coin collector and wanted to put his coins online to showcase and sell.  D’oh. Static pages, sure, but I couldn’t do that with 1000+ coins!  I’m too lazy to maintain something like that, even if I didn’t know how to make “dynamic web pages”. What a nightmare.  The year was 1998 and a friend pointed me towards picking up CGI or Perl for the task of speaking to a database, so I set off to find an ISP that could host it for us.

I called a company in Edmonton called Internet Crossroads and the helpful owner on the other line asked me “Why would you use PERL or CGI? Why not use Cold Fusion?” I had no good reply except “I have a friend who uses Perl who can help me through connecting to the database, and he’s played with CGI”. He said, “If you know HTML you will be able to get things done way faster in ColdFusion, even if you learn it from scratch compared to PERL or CGI.” Me. “Okay, thanks”.

Thats all there was to it.  I never even got his name.  They got bought out and maybe I can thank and meet him one day.

I found the online Cold Fusion docs on Allaire’s website just as 4.0 had come out. I laser printed out all the documentation (about 900 pages) and put them into huge 4″ binders.  I got through about 200 pages when I stopped reading the documentation and was up and building a proof-of-concept of the coin site.  It wasn’t my best work knowing what ColdFusion could do, but it blew away my coin collecting customer. Sadly once he saw that his dreams were a lot more work than hiring a student for $10/hr, we went our separate ways and I kept my code.

One year later I found my first consulting client to  a web catalog in ColdFusion for what became my first client, and now old friend, mentor.  I moved on to do work to drive a website for a large enterprise company for almost 10 years with a team of 2-3 people outside of their infrastructure, entirely written and delivered in ColdFusion.

Why ColdFusion appealed to me, then and now.

Even though I was in Computing Science in university, I didn’t really enjoy programming.  I was pretty good at it and could coast on my math skills to solve problems with some clear thinking.  Interest wise, I was so busy loving developing for the internet that it was painful to come back to earth and use a normal “application” language.  Who wanted to build desktop apps anymore when I could connect anything and everything to the web?  Sure, there was always the issue of my internet not becoming popular and the new way that everyone did everything, but, that worry seems to have gone away..  and the world has come to the web.

Over 10 years later, I now have developed a consulting practice that focuses less on the technologies we use, but the solutions we create and the change we enable because of those solutions.  If there’s a web problem to be solved, ColdFusion is usually at the center of it because it’s so incredibly capable out of the box.  And we should be creatures of familiarity to create great value for our customers, not experiment and play on their dime.  If CF isn’t in place, or not a fit, I don’t fret too much, it usually just takes more time (and way more money to pay for developers time) to get through it.  I still enjoy my CF projects the most and look forward to starting new ones with it because it still has not let me down, while other platforms celebrate adding features, performance, stability, capabilities that I’ve enjoyed for many years thanks to the marriage of ColdFusion and Java.  Even though I didn’t enjoy Java, I knew the millions Sun spent pressure testing and performance enhancing it put me in good hands.

The rest is the future.  ColdFusion now has a few great open source engines in addition to the paid offering from Adobe.  The majority of opinions out there are outdated, ironically by geeks being judgemental in ways they were likely judged and picked on in school.  Still, its up to us to start creating remarkable applications for the world in a record amount of time, that’s what has given other communities their legitimate and well earned reputations.  Most people don’t know this and a lot of other things and their opinions are based entirely on hearsay and zero experience.  We could fault them… or start sharing and creating remarkable apps that we are passionate about.   More to come about this in a future post..

This is a bit of an overdue blog post — I have written a lot of drafts and a recent spell of travel has meant I haven’t been able to polish and publish much.. Sorry!

I do have one big piece of news to announce, the gang over at Mura CMS (Blue River Interactive) have asked me to speak at MuraCon 2011 in Sacramento, California on August 25-26th!

Mura’s community is growing rapidly and a conference a perfect boost for it!  There’s a bunch of very cool speakers and sessions, I can’t wait to attend and learn myself when I’m there from some of the best and brightest in the Mura community.

Pricing is a reasonable $99 for two whole days of Mura content… a steal if I ever saw one. I know they have very few seats left, get your seat registered right away if you can get to Sacramento then.

My session will be covering Mura CMS Plugins using FW/1.. I guest hosted Mura Show #47 about an intro to plugins and I plan on covering a bit more in this talk about plugin development, the plugin ecosystem and how we all can benefit from creating and supporting plugins.

If you are a designer or developer interested/experienced in Mura, I’d love to hear about your experience (or lack therof) with Mura CMS plugins, hit me up!