Episode #64: From ColdFusion to Serverless with Raymond Camden

About Raymond Camden Raymond Camden is Lead Developer Evangelist at HERE Technologies. He’s an expert in web standards, Node, and serverless with a passion for teaching others. He has written about, and presented on, technologies for the past fifteen years, and enjoys helping others become passionate about the web as well. Ray is a prolific writer, as evident from his blog content as well as in industry publications. He has authored (and contributed to) multiple books over the years, such as his book Developing Serverless Applications, and speaks at conferences around the world. Twitter: twitter.com/raymondcamden Blog: www.raymondcamden.com/ HERE Technologies: www.here.com/ Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2I3nNsU6HSs Transcript Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm chatting with Raymond Camden. Hey, Ray. Thanks for joining me. Ray: Thank you for having me. Jeremy: So, you are a Lead Developer Evangelist at HERE Technologies. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and what HERE Technologies does? Ray: Sure. I'll start with HERE. So, we do everything involving location. So, we have a mapping platform. We have APIs for routing, geocoding, reverse geocoding, anything that a developer may need in regards to location or mapping we have technologies and tools for. People are free to reach out to me later to talk to me about it. Jeremy: Awesome. And your background? Ray: Let's see. I've been in web development since '93 or so. So, I've been around for a while. I spent a long time doing back end work. Last decade or so, more front end work. I've been involved in developer relations unofficially for most of that time, because I like to share, I like to give presentations and stuff like that. Officially in DevRel for six or seven years or so. Jeremy: Awesome. All right. So, if people don't know you, if anybody was ever involved in the ColdFusion community, you are a legend in the ColdFusion community. I was looking through my old books trying to find some of the old books that you had written, I think ColdFusion MX 7. You and Ben Forta had so much material out there. I was a huge fan and always fall into stuff that you guys were doing back then. So, I'm super excited to have you on the show. What was kind of funny is I was a ColdFusion guy way, way back in the day, as well. I had a big customer, it was a college that was doing everything ColdFusion. So, I learned ColdFusion just for that customer and I actually fell in love with ColdFusion. I thought it was a great language, it was super easy to use, all kinds of features, but I eventually got away from that and I really wasn't following what you were doing anymore. Then, all of a sudden, I come around maybe two years ago and I see you're working on serverless stuff. So, I would love to get that perspective of how you went from ColdFusion to serverless. Ray: Absolutely. So, I began actually with Perl CGI scripts back in the old days where there were no real defined roles. I would do everything HTML, Photoshop work, and back end work. I discovered pretty quickly that I don't make things pretty. I enjoyed the back end work because back then, having a web page be dynamic was a big deal. I can remember at college finding some random website that would pick three tarot cards and it was random. I was amazed by that. It would take five minutes to load the images. I would sit there and just reload. So, I kind of migrated there. I got into ColdFusion because I had been doing Perl CGIs for a while, but we had a client who had a SQL Server system. I knew that Perl could talk to it, but also knew that it wouldn't be fun to write that code and just randomly discovered that ColdFusion supposedly made working with SQL Server and Access, et cetera, it made that easy. That was right. I kind of fell in love and spent probably a good 15 years doing just ColdFusion stuff. Jeremy: Yeah. No. I mean, it's funny because I have, I think, pretty much the same exact background. I started in college with Perl and CGI. Then, I went to PHP and MySQL and sort of that stuff, but then moved over to ColdFusion. I spent many, many, many years with ColdFusion until I moved back to PHP. So, when you got to the end of that ColdFusion era, what was the next step after you sort of were done with ColdFusion? Ray: So, I remember when JavaScript came in, but it quickly became hard to use. You know the whole browser war type thing? Jeremy: Yeah. Ray: So, not only with me not being able to design well, the other reason I didn't like doing the front end work because it was such a pain to make everything compatible with IE4 and Netscape 4, et cetera, so working on the back end, somebody would just hand me HTML and I'd make it dynamic. What got me kind of looking back is I remember I was bored at work. Ajax had been around. Gmail, I think, had just come out, so the whole Web 2.0 thing was fresh in people's minds. I had only done a tiny bit of JavaScript over the years. I thought, "Let me look at it some more," now that supposedly things are a little bit better. And I found out that, yeah, things were a bit better. Browser dev tools were around. And so, I just started doing more work on the client side and I began to realize that having the app server there, primarily because browsers were so horrible, wasn't necessarily the case anymore. There was a lot more that I could do on the front end and without an app server. Jeremy: Yeah. No. I mean, I think that was one of the things that was the biggest pain for all of us that were ... I mean, I owned a web development company for 12 years. So, battling with IE6 and all the different browser compatibilities was definitely a huge problem, which is why one of the things that I think we did or we did well was build back end applications that would completely render the pages. And as you said, as we move towards this more of an Ajax, sort of filling things out, and of course now, we're into a whole new era with single page apps and React and Vue and things like that, but what was it, though, that once ... So, once you started building some of these more interactive JavaScript side of things, were you still using ColdFusion or did you move to something else for your back ends? Ray: Well, so it's interesting. Yeah. I was still using ColdFusion, but what I began to notice is that ColdFusion began to get more and more dumb in terms of what it was doing, whereas before, I was rendering entirely the entire site. It began to be just a JSON provider. One of the things that kind of got me off ColdFusion is that, at the time, it did JSON very badly. It would have this wonderful feature where, because it was typeless, it had to make guesses in terms of what your data was. If you would try to take someone's name, let's say possibly an Asian person who's last name was No, Dr. No, maybe. It would, in JSON, convert that to false. You had no control over that at all. So, both seeing how small I needed ColdFusion and seeing it kind of fail in terms of generating JSON, that began my migration to more Node.js development. Jeremy: Yeah. And so, when you started using Node.js, were you still setting u...