I really love my job. I love almost everything about Dealerskins; from the people, to the work. What I love most about it is that I'm able to go to work everyday and do something that I love. There's not to many people that can say that.

One of the best things about Dealerskins is the open environment there. Just today I got to participate in an impromptu 30 minute hallway meeting with the our Director of Operations, our Product Manager, and the Development Manager (my boss, Aaron West) regarding the future of our Enterprise level company. I really feel like I'm respected and appreciated there, and that's such a shot of adrenaline in the arm that it makes me want to work all the more harder.

It's really cool because I get to be involved in almost every aspect of the lifecycle of our tools (or web applications as they're called in the biz). I get to help plan the project, then I get to write the code for it, and lastly (in some cases), I also get to be involved in rolling it out and seeing people use it!

I realize that I am truly blessed by God to have a career in a field that I love, doing work that I eagerly look forward to, with people that are great. That's a rare occurrence and I hope that it's not something that I take for granted. Thank you Lord!

Last fall, Andy took a ColdFusion Certification class taught by a friend here in Nashville. The purpose was to be trained and eventually take a test to become a certified developer. He could tell you more about it than I can, but here we are, 7 months later, and he finally took the test.

He was a little worried about it, partially because the test covers more aspects of the program than he has ever used, but also because it's been a while since he took a test. He had been doing well on the practice tests, though, and I had full confidence in him.

So, he went and took the test yesterday, and not only did he pass, but he came in at the expert level! I'm so proud of him! He said that he was going to write about it on here, and he probably will to give you more details, but I wanted to brag on him as well. I challenged him to at least schedule his test before we left for Chicago this weekend, and he greatly exceeded that challenge. Way to go, Andy!

Those of you that know me, know that I'm in love with a web-based programming language called ColdFusion. It's elegant, streamlined and very powerful. It's not quite as widely-used as other languages like PHP or ASP and one of the reasons why, in my opinion, is the lack of open-source (free) applications.

It seems as it in the past few months, many programmers have been remedying that issue. Coldfusion programmer Brian Rinaldi has compiled an exhaustive list of Free and open-source applications and all of them are written using Coldfusion.

Anyway, here's a tiny list of sites I've found that are very useful for Coldfusion programmers. Enjoy!

Brian Rinaldi's blog
Ray Camden's blog
CFQuickDocs - Coldfusion docs reference (written in AJAX)
House of Fusion (Coldfusion mailing list)
Sitepoint Coldfusion Forums Coldfusion Cookbook