Last week I learned that I've been selected as an Adobe Community Expert. I'm very excited and honored to be chosen to participate in this program. Adobe explains the program this way:

The Adobe Community Experts Program is a community based program made up of Adobe customers who share their product expertise with the world-wide Adobe community. The Adobe Community Experts' mission is to provide high caliber peer-to-peer communication educating and improving the product skills of Adobe customers worldwide.

All Adobe Community Experts are expected to exemplify the program fundamentals of product proficiency, enthusiasm, and professionalism towards Adobe and our customer base. In addition, Adobe Community Experts agree to be active contributors to the Adobe world-wide community by:

• Engaging in peer to peer support in the Adobe forums
• Posting information and technical support in their favorite online community
• Writing articles for professional publications
• Presenting Adobe product presentations at conferences and user groups

Being accepted into the program is an honor because it is a public recognition of my efforts to promote Adobe technologies over the past 5 years. I promote Adobe products such as ColdFusion, Flex and AIR because I truly believe they empower me to be more productive then any other competitive technologies. To put it simply, without ColdFusion and Flex being so easy and powerful there is no way that I could have built a full featured rich application like SlideSix from the ground up on my own. But why choose Adobe ColdFusion over the various other CFML engines - especially when I'm basically unfunded? There are a number of reason why I stick with Adobe. First and foremost is community. There is a vast network of people that I can go to if I get stuck with something. Hell, even if I stump the community I can usually ping someone directly at Adobe who is usually quick to respond with an answer or a promise to look into the issue. I've even seen issues raised by friends in the community that directly result in hot fixes being issued within a week. Sure, it's not the instant gratification of an open source engine, but I think the trade off is worth it. Adobe is seriously dedicated to the ColdFusion product. It's tied into their stack and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Open source CFML engines have come and gone over the past 5 years that I've been actively participating in the ColdFusion community. I'm not saying that the current alternative engines like Railo and OpenBD will suffer the same fate, but I don't see them assuming a significant share of the ColdFusion market. I'm happy they exist and I do think they provide a suitable alternative for some folks (competition is always a good thing), but in the long run I'll stick with Adobe ColdFusion. I could go on, but the point of this entry is to thank the folks at Adobe for publicly recognizing my efforts. I'm happy to participate in the ColdFusion, and to a lesser degree Flex, communities. I have a real passion for development that didn't manifest itself until I was introduced to ColdFusion and realized how simple it made things. If I wasn't passionate I wouldn't spend so much of my free time (don't forget, I am not a developer by day) writing code, working on articles and preparing presentations for conferences.