I wanted to explain where and why the name of my CF journal came from; cfwhisperer.  The actual name was suggested to me by someone I very much respect.  Someone who, as yet, remains largely undiscovered in our ColdFusion realm but who has more combined web application talent than anyone I have worked with before; their time for full recognition and reward will arrive, eventually.

There was a very good film (movie) The Horse Whisperer and there is now a very good TV show, The Dog Whisperer.  Both relate to an uncanny ability to sense and relate to animals and in the case of The Dog Whisperer, the ability to identify and control severe behavioral problems.  Problems not just in the dogs but often in and caused by their owners.

For the past 12 years I have been using ColdFusion and prior to that had worked in networking and also database design, in a part-time way, for bulletin boards.  Since 1999 much of my CF work has revolved around troubleshooting and fixing troubled CF and J2EE web applications.  Typically I had no more than 5 days and in many cases 2-3 days to find and fix issues which had gone on for months or even years.  Every time I went to a client I was unsure of what I would find, yet with only one exception and without arrogance I always succeeded.  I found the answers not by just looking in the CF server, not just in the database server, not just in the network, not just in the Internet piece; I found the answers by visualizing a homogenous entity, the web application, comprised all of those pieces.  Somehow over those years I developed an innate sense of where the problems lay, so I will write about how that evolved in this new journal; cfwhisperer.