Sam Farmer head shot

Sam Farmer

Growing up I never imagined I would play bass guitar for the Dave Matthews Band. And indeed it never happened.

But I have become a passionate and pretty good web developer.
I write ColdFusion (my expertise) in the middle; jQuery, ExtJS and Flex/Air on the front with MySQL and SQLServer for data storage. I've worked with others but those are the technologies I've enjoyed using in the past two years.

I am a 34 year old happily married father of two daughters living and working in Washington, DC. Currently I work for WebFirst a small well run consulting company. I am also a huge Arsenal fan, having grown up in Highbury, London, and I play soccer every week.

Blog

Infinite entities, cfgrid and one cfc to handle the data
While writing SpreadEdit I wanted every entity to be editable via cfgrid.  In particular I thought it would be cool to have one cfc on the back end to process the data from cfgrid no matter what entity it was working with.  With ColdFusion 9 and ORM this proved possible and is pretty... read the rest (posted 3/10/10)

Thoughts on first Flex/Air app
Recently I launched my first Flex-based Air application.  Here are my thoughts: Flex apps are real apps Previously I thought Flex applications where simply the V in an MVC framework with a bunch of fancy UI widgets.  Now I see differently and the value of a Flex MVC framework becomes... read the rest (posted 3/5/10)

In ColdFusion 9, what isNull() and what is it good for
ColdFusion 9 brings us a new function called isNull.  But, you may say ColdFusion doesn't support null's and you would still be mostly right.  As of ColdFusion 9 certain objects can be null.  Sound tricky?  Here are a couple handy uses for isNull. Working with caches When using... read the rest (posted 2/24/10)

Presentations

2010
I will give two presentations at CFUnited in July. 10 things you should know about ORM will introduce developers to the wonderful and fun world of using ORM in development. ColdFusion One Liners will be based on the same presentation at CFinNC but with some new material and adjustments based on feedback. Its my first time repeating a presentation and I am looking forward to it. CFUnited is always a great conference and the Landsdowne Resort is a wonderful location.
 
2009
I gave a presentation on ColdFusion One Liners at the CFinNC conference. I really enjoyed giving this presentation that shows the power of ColdFusion in one line intermingled with comedic one liners. The conference was great.
 
2008
My first time speaking at a conference proved to be a little nerve racking, satisfying and fun. I gave two presentations on Creating, Manipulating and Printing PDFs and Intro to CFML as a language. Go here for the presentations and code and my feedback on the evaluations I got.

How To Screencasts

Here are some screencasts I made in 2007 for ColdFusion 8:

ColdFusion 8, A Quick Look at the cfAjaxProxy Tag

ColdFusion 8, A Quick Look at the cfdiv tag

me.online

You can find me on Twitter, Stack Overflow, RiaForge, LinkedIn and Google.
 

Recognition

In 2010 I got named an Adobe Community Professional.
 
I finished in the runner up spots for Best of ColdFusion 9 contest run by Raymond Camden for my SpreadEdit entry.
 

I contributed a lot to the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) beta process and got a mention on the credits page (ColdFusion Administrator > Blue I > About CF)
 
Along with my then colleague Dominic O'Connor won the Best of Scorpio (CF8) contest.

I launched my blog in April 2007 and was a joint winner of the best of new blog at the 2007 CFEmmys.