Charlie Arehart - Testimonials

Endorsements/Testimonials/References/Comments

If you may be interested to hear what others have thought of Charlie's services, here are unsolicited endorsements, testimonials, and comments from many of his consulting clients. (When a poignant one may be offered in an email reply, Charlie might ask if he can quote it here. Sometimes respondents kindly offer to elaborate a bit, for publication here.) And some are instead Linked Recommendations, ExpertsExchange testimonials, etc. which clients have offered (indicated as such below).

If you may prefer to speak with a client to obtain direct references, contacts may be arranged upon request.

Clients

2023

"First and foremost, thank you very much for your service and support. Really, really appreciated! Honestly, it's been a complete pleasure working with you. I really like that you enjoy sharing your knowledge. If you ever plan to visit Puerto Rico, let me know!" ⁽²⁰²³⁾

René Ramos
(Design2

"Thank you! Everything is running more stable than ever. :-) The site is noticeably faster too, even when traffic increases (which would previously lead to deadlocks)." ⁽²⁰²³⁾

Lee Johnson, Executive VP
(RadioSparx & AudioSparx

2022

"We are very thankful to have your expertise available to us when we need it!" ⁽²⁰²²⁾

Vicki Pruskowski
(Lead Solution Architect, AFSP

"Oh man that was one of the best 1.25 hours I've ever spent with anyone technical. Your advice on using FusionReactor as well as SSMS helped me figure out how to get some requests from 10 minutes down to 1 second! You've been a God-send, opening my eyes to a whole lot of things that had been hiding in plain sight." ⁽²⁰²²⁾

Dave Morris, CEO
(The Electronic QSL Card Centre

"[Charlie] is extremely knowledgeable, and very helpful. Certainly is an expert!!!, very thorough, clear and concise with his direction." ⁽²⁰²²⁾

diecasthft01
(testimonial from Experts Exchange)

"Thanks for the troubleshooting help you've given us, especially using FusionReactor. We've addressed issues we found, and the impact has been huge! We've reduced our average response time by 75%, to well within our SLAs, making management very happy. Our sessions with you have allowed us to better understand our environment and been incredibly valuable." ⁽²⁰²²⁾

Kim Fanto
Peregrin Services

2021

"Thanks for the assistance today…others on the session were every bit as impressed by your skills and knowledge as I have been and keep telling everyone. I can't believe we waited this long to tap into your consulting services…so much time and pain over the years could have been avoided. Well…better late than never!" ⁽²⁰²¹⁾

Dustin J Roller, EVP and CTO
Metrix Learning

"As always you came through with excellent suggestions and support, and walked me through the problem-solving process in style." ⁽²⁰²¹⁾

Jon Kusnir
Enterprise Internet Applications Developer
TELUS Communications Inc.

2020

"I'm very, very satisfied that the help you provided led us in the direction to solve the problem. We couldn't have done it without you. We have not had the dreaded timeout issue that we were faced with randomly, and the system did see a performance improvement with page requests appearing to be a bit peppier!" ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

B. Polackoff
VAIRKKO

"We love having you as a resource to our team. Over the years we have reached out for an multitude of issues and you have always been there to guide us. What I love best is that you help teach the team to be self sufficient by offering recommendations for tools and other resources. I gain so much knowledge and at times feel a bit guilty for not implementing everything you talk about. You are an extremely valuable extension of our team - being the first and only person that comes to mind when needing to solve a cf related issue. " ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

Bill Davis, Director of IT
ACD Direct

"I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all your amazing help! Through working with you, my debugging skills have improved also! You've been a tremendous help, thank you! " ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

Clinton Tu, Developer
Logiforms

"Thanks so much for your help. Always a fantastic experience! I have to tell you CF was crashing a lot before we worked on the server. It hasn't crashed since." ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

Bob Bell
Full Blown Studios

"I really appreciate all your help over the years: from saving me time, to saving my bacon!" ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

Ric Bailey
President, Plymouth Rocket

"On top of the relief from your helping complete our server move, it's your availability going forward that feels like I've got a safety net…under my safety net. I really value your knowledge, dedication and enthusiasm. Thank you!" ⁽²⁰²⁰⁾

David Johnson
Director of Technical Services, HL7 International

2019

"Thanks again for your help and knowledge! It's truly amazing the amount of CF knowledge you have. I'm very happy to have you part of the team helping with things!!!" ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Kevin Huth
IT Project Manager/Architect at Nonprofits Insurance Alliance

"You're the king. Haven't had one issue since last week and even some of our occasional database slowness has calmed down." ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Grant Moncur
eStream, Inc.

"Charlie is a consummate professional - not only is he an exceptionally knowledgeable ColdFusion consultant, but he's also an outstanding educator and mentor. My team and I have been developing ColdFusion applications for decades now, and Charlie is our go-to resource for any circumstance in which we feel out of our depth. His rates are exceptionally reasonable: by way of illustration, a single half-hour session with Charlie saved our team from dozens of hours of code refactoring. He's incredibly prompt to reply to our requests, his answers are thorough and insightful, and his technical skills are unsurpassed. In addition, he never fails to follow up to ensure that his consultations fully addressed our needs. We trust Charlie with our most valuable CF projects, and I can't recommend him highly enough!" (from LinkedIn) ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Michael Fleischmann
Co-Founder at Permia

"Charlie Arehart has been a tremendous asset to our business. He has prodigious knowledge in so many areas related to IT. I got to know him through his CF server troubleshooting business and I have been delighted with his stellar service, vast knowledge, availability and professional approach to teaching and problem solving. It has been a pleasure working with him and I highly recommend him for server troubleshooting. He is also very experienced with SQL server database and other technology platforms. If you are stuck and are looking for a top-notch IT professional to remotely augment your staff, give Charlie a call. You will not regret it" (from LinkedIn) ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Dr. Ajit Thomas
CTO at MaxBounty

"Having worked with you more than once now, I've been extremely impressed with your quick response time, problem-solving ability, professionalism, and interest in not just fixing the problem yourself but also building up our own troubleshooting skills. Your methodical, step by step investigation transformed a confusing, hair-pulling server issue into a clear problem with a simple solution, which in this case turned out to be a low level cloud infrastructure issue that had nothing to do with CF or our app code. You are a web app troubleshooting rock star, and anybody with significant CF deployments ought to keep your contact info handy." ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Conan Saunders
MyComicShop

"Thanks to you, the problematic server is much more stable, and we're continuing to squash bugs with the assistance of FusionReactor." ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Kyle Shiflett
Mental Wildfire

"Thanks for your help. I've been used to figuring things out on my own, and with the assistance and guidance you provided, it actually led me to new things to look at which I was able to build upon. In fact, your help was so above par in giving me insights and tool recommendations that I've not needed to reach out again for technical assistance for a long time. But rest assured that if that need does arise in the future, I would not hesitate to reach out to you first." ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Brian Cain
Development Team Manager, CareersInFood

"I have enjoyed immensely working with you on the CF issues. Your energy and devotion to help a person learn and resolve issues makes you a 'one of a kind' person. One I will ALWAYS appreciate and respect. I want to thank you for the time and patience you have always showed to me." ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Tony Childers, Database administrator
Comtech / EPA

"You have been a lifesaver!" ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Bryan Evans, Director of Application Development
Orbit Irrigation Products

"We really appreciate all your help over the last few months. Our uptime now far exceeds any previous record over the past decade!" ⁽²⁰¹⁹⁾

Nick Powell, Director of IT
American Association of Individual Investors (AAII)

2018

"We really get value out of our sessions with Charlie. I refer to him as the 'CF counselor', like a marriage therapist—but for dev/ops teams. He gets us all to take a close look at issues and review them, then we generally reach breakthrough's with his direction. Of course, and to mix metaphors: sometimes I do wish he could just "paint the house and mow the lawn for us", rather than leading us in how to "do the work" for ourselves, but we know that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. :-)" ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Jason Solarek
Bridge Store & Network

"We really appreciate your recommendations. One of them I honestly don't think would have ever crossed my mind, but was the first step that got us going. The troubleshooting help you provided was extremely valuable as it got us looking at the right spots in FusionReactor which enabled us to uncover errors and possible sources of our CPU spikes. Thanks so much. As always, we'll be ringing your number when we are in our next crisis! We appreciate having you in our corner when trouble hits. Our conversations always prompt us with lots of new possibilities to research!" ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Dan Rutledge, CEO/CTO
SignupGenius

"All I can say is wow. I'm feeling so good after you solved the biggest tech problem we have had for years, that I just went out and signed up for a an expensive class I've been wanting to take. We probably spent 35+ man hours on our own trying to solve a problem which you solved in less than an hour. With 10M visitors hitting it a year, a tech problem affects many people around the world. So I'm breathing a big sigh of relief now. Should have called you sooner." ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Mike Robinson
CareerPlanner

"I personally really appreciate you. You've shared a tremendous wealth of knowledge out there with the ColdFusion community and so many of us have benefited from your time, efforts and sharing. Hope our paths cross again in the future!" ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Holly Swartz
GoMembers

"Everything has been going smoothly, memory usage hovers at about 10% even with heavy loads, cpu is solid as well. Thanks again for your help, and if there is anything else we need assistance with I will definitely contact you." ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Mike

"You're like Batman, Superman, and the other superheros! It was a total delight 'meeting' you (online) and experiencing your expertise in ColdFusion. We could tell in just a few minutes that you and your knowledge are exactly what we've been needing to help us figure out why we were crashing a dozen times per day. You're awesome—and we're sold on FusionReactor also. Thank you sooooooo much." ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

Robert Fisher (Sr. Analyst) and Gary Dunger (Business Process Manager)
State of California, Office of Statewide Health Planning & Development

(For the remainder of endorsments below, note that I used to list the name and then the quote. I have reversed that above and will do so going forward.)

Garrett Diehl, System Administrator

"Because of the foundation you've helped us create, it's not uncommon for our CF servers to run for 100 days or more between reboots, and the reboots/restarts are almost never CF related." ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾
Lee Farrell

"Everything is running great since we meet. Sessions came down to about 45k from 1.5 million over a few days since we made the code change. Heap is flat maintaining about 2gb and never trending upward like it did before. I think that's the fix we needed, about that and some related issues. Site performance is great and this is the first time in a long time we've gone so long without a reboot.

I'm now reconsidering some environmental upgrades we were considering, now that things are running fine where we are. Your assistance was invaluable: you helped us find in one two-hour the solution we'd been seeking for over a year on our own, so your time was money well-spent." ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾
"Stick"

"Thank you. By using FR and with your help, I've found we have more issues of network connectivity and database issues then originally thought. Now when I have issues, I can ask such folks "was something going on at that time?", and I usually get an admission that "we did something to the database server" or "the network was taken down", though there was no record or notice of it otherwise." [Ed. How about that? FR as virtual "truth serum"? :-)] ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾
Louis Scherr
InstantSeats

"It's always nice to know someone is there in case of an emergency. It's worth the bucks!" ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾
Pete Williamson,CTO
Carmen Data

"Thanks for your help. I'm not quite sure how things got to be as they were, but I have a much better understanding now. The main thing I've learnt is not to wait so long before getting in touch with you to help!" ⁽²⁰¹⁸⁾

2017

Charles Robertson
Comment via blog

"You are a legend, sir. I am amazed about how sweetly my CMS is running now. Very fast & responsive and no crashes. Just one small change has made an enormous difference. Thank heavens, there are ColdFusion gurus, like yourself, around." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Adam Spinner, Chief Executive Officer
SpinnerTech

"You are always immensely helpful and provide prompt service: a role model for anyone who provides service for clients." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
An S&P 500 company (name and company withheld upon request)

"Thank you again for all of your help. We really do appreciate it and the team is thrilled to have your guidance! During our deep dive sessions, our goals were to learn about troubleshooting tools and drive stability to our environment. The team was impressed with your deep knowledge, recommended solutions and communication skills to help them learn and become self-sufficient. You truly are an expert in this space and because of you we solved our problems and our team is better equipped for any future challenges. Thank you!" ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
A racing organization (name and company withheld upon request)

"Thanks for your help. Things have been performing quite well since we met. I'm absolutely convinced your help in using FR has been of great benefit to us and allowed us to get much better insight into the issues we were having. It was a pretty rough ride with the site issues prior to us getting in touch with you, and it's been very helpful to have your wisdom and advice to call on. We greatly appreciate it. ...[and then some weeks later]...Things are going much better with our site - we've had no downtime so my life has been a lot better over the past month or so :-)" ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Steve Jaeger
Enrollment123, Inc
"Thank you for the help you have provided. I feel it was essential to helping us solve the problems we were experiencing." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Mike Robinson
CareerPlanner

"You are a damn good teacher. I've learned a lot from you during our sessions and my web site runs a whole lot better. Faster, less glitches due to SQL, etc." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Steven Novak
Lake-Link Inc
"Your help and advice is always excellent and appreciated!" ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Alec Irwin
Johnson Brothers Liquor Company
"Thank you for your help on Wednesday. You really saved us. It is always awesome to work with you. The ColdFusion server is running much better and we haven't had any issues since." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾
Mike Chytracek
Ignite Solutions
"After a few hours with Charlie taking us on a pretty deep dive into both the JVM and our application logs and making a few recommendations, our CF11 server is running better and more efficiently than it ever has." ⁽²⁰¹⁷⁾

2016

Craig Dualba
Perfume Emporium
"All the changes you made worked amazing, no issues since then...performance has been great." ⁽²⁰¹⁶⁾
John Kennedy, Sr. Dir of IT
NASPA
"I just wanted to thank you and tell you how well our SalesForce integration went. It's been a huge success. With your help and tutelage, the oath SF process worked like a charm! On day one, the CF site had to offer its own SF login and handoff to two 3rd party sites. Those integrations worked seamlessly and perfectly! And that, my friend, is in large part due to your heroic efforts with me over a holiday weekend. Charlie, I can't overstate how important and valuable your time and work with me was. My success with this SF integration – and all the moving parts – could not have occurred without your few hours of guidance and help. Thank you, and should I have a need for help in the upcoming months, I won't hesitate to ask for your help again. BTW, a big thank you for your CF posts and pearls of wisdom I have read across the web. Priceless, honestly!" ⁽²⁰¹⁶⁾
Michael Duebner

"The service and expertise we receive from Charlie is first rate. Charlie's approach to solving a problem is unique in that he doesn't just wave a magic wand, although you may choose this option, instead he explains in appropriate detail the changes that need to be made and what the impact will be. In the end, you not only are up and running, you also know why." ⁽²⁰¹⁶⁾
Eric Martin
Influence Health
"The team has enjoyed the assist and educational nature of delivery. The world needs more folks like Charlie Arehart." ⁽²⁰¹⁶⁾

2015

Alex Saberi
Episcript Solutions
"I want to thank you again for resolving the stubborn problems that we had with ColdFusion for quite some time. Initially, we had little hope that much could be done after trying every single solution that was suggested online. I was amazed later to see how much deeper you were able to go in your trouble-shooting and eventually finding the cause of the problem and resolving it. I'm not only relieved that you fixed the ColdFusion outage problem, but your fine-tuning and optimizing of CF and IIS has made our websites noticeably faster and lighter. The CF uptime has been 100% since we last spoke! No problems there whatsoever. I couldn't be happier!" ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Bill Cohen
All Stitch
"I hate having issues, but it makes me feel better to know I have you in my corner." ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Bill Gordon, Chief Technologist
Paragon
"I had a sticky problem, and after a very fruitful remote session with Charlie (whose diagnostic and troubleshooting skills are beyond amazing), we got it sorted out." ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Dan Rutledge, CEO/CTO
SignupGenius
"Thanks so much for the help. With the odd challenge that we faced, there really just aren't that many people in the entire country who could have helped get it solved. No amount of blog searching was going to solve that one for me, so your help was invaluable!" ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Ronald Woodruff, IT Manager
Acoustic Sounds
"Our time with you was money well spent. I learned a lot, and we were losing much more than that in sales every hour we were down before we called." ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Ed Szwedo
ECS-Federal
"As always, it was great working with you. You saved us a ton of time. Your expertise is WELL worth the cost." ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾
Roy Hallanger
Minneapolis Public Schools
"Thanks again, your support was exactly what I needed to get the website up and running again quickly!" ⁽²⁰¹⁵⁾

2014

Jeff Smallwood
NAVAIR's Systems Engineering Development and Implementation Center
[Referring to Charlie's blog posts and forum contributions] I just wanted to say that the thoroughness of your replies (present and past) on troubleshooting subjects are not wasted effort. Your efforts to encompass and discuss a wider view of the issues at hand in order to better understand a topic are always appreciated. As a usual lurker on various resources where you write, I don't always say thanks when something helps me out and I wanted to tell you. ⁽²⁰¹⁴⁾
Brandon Sauls
InterCoastal Net Designs
"Your guidance has been key in our uptime and you've pulled us out of some real jams in the past 5 years. Thanks again Charlie!" ⁽²⁰¹⁴⁾
James Sevener
Alpine Web
"You really saved us the other day. We are now at 6 days with no outages, which is the best we've had in a while. Thanks!" ⁽²⁰¹⁴⁾
Mik Muller
Montague WebWorks

"Charlie's the uber-santa. Let me explain: there's a movie called, "I Am Santa Claus". It's a bizarre documentary from 2014 about five guys who are professional Santas, ie; they get hired to be at a department store or mall or to go to people's houses. Some are better than others. Some are higher priced than others. Some have been doing it longer than others, etc.

But for all of them, whether they're members of the Fraternal Brotherhood of Santa's or whatever the union is called, there's this ONE GUY who they all recognize as the real deal. The uber-Santa. The Guru Santa to whom they all eventually will make a pilgrimage to learn how to be the best Santa they can be.

That's Charlie. :-) Well, you get my drift. Charlie gets sh*t done." ⁽²⁰¹⁴⁾

2013

Anthony Childers
Database Analyst, North Carolina Department of Information Technology
"Charlie is well versed on Coldfusion and has assisted in problem solving and installations of ColdFusion. He is personable and very easy to work with. His billing and time keeping for sessions is very very affordable." (from LinkedIn) ⁽²⁰¹³⁾
Eliezer Ekstein
C&A Marketing Inc
"Charlie is probably the most efficient consultant that I ever met, quick, to the point and won't waste one minute! It was just a pleasure to deal with him..." (from LinkedIn) ⁽²⁰¹³⁾
Jason Solarek
Bridge Store & Network
"Charlie is one of the best investments we've made in our web site. Most things are commodities. There are comparable web hosting companies, servers, etc. Charlie is unique, and will give you a 20x return on your investment with him." ⁽²⁰¹³⁾
Solution Oriented Systems, Inc.
"Best money I've ever spent" ⁽²⁰¹³⁾

2012

Bill Brock
Founder, Technology Projects
"It's been great having you available and I really appreciate the level of understanding that you bring with your assistance. We've learned a lot and it's made ongoing troubleshooting more effective on our part." ⁽²⁰¹²⁾
Jeff Meister
Ignite Solutions
The time we spent together was valuable. I refactored a troublesome scheduled task and the server has been running for 34 days straight now. ⁽²⁰¹²⁾
Chris Hoffman
Managed Artwork
"I've been using CF since 1995 and love it. We brought Charlie in to help with some ColdFusion performance woes we've experienced lately. It turns out the recent problems had nothing to do with ColdFusion inherently, or code (as I suspected), but rather was an issue with some configuration settings. Charlie helped us find, understand, and change what was needed, and since then we have had no unexpected restarts!

He should have meta tags that reflect 'Mental Health Professional' as prominent as 'ColdFusion Performance Guru'. As an entrepreneur, who's spent my whole life creating value out nothing, Charlie's the greatest value-proposition I've ever had the luxury of working with." ⁽²⁰¹²⁾
Tim Cunningham
VP Operations, IDMI Systems
"Once again @carehart proves to be my special Devops super hero. If you need server troubleshooting help, he is your man! #ColdFusion #IIS" (written via twitter, reposted and attributed here with his permission) ⁽²⁰¹²⁾
Bryan Evans
Orbit Irrigation Products Inc.
Thanks for your time. Our folks are very impressed with your knowledge and how great you've been to work with. You'll always be the first person we call if we ever run into a problem. ⁽²⁰¹²⁾

2011

Ken Smith, Director, Technology Solutions
AssettNation.com
We contacted Charlie because our server was performing poorly. In helping us analyze diagnostics and logs, he demonstrated pretty quickly that the problem was not in fact CF, but Apache. That helped take the pressure off our consideration of our app or the server (or CF) being the problem. While we investigated Apache, Charlie suggested we might consider IIS instead, noting that IIS 7 was quite an improvement. Though we had some Apache experts identify some needed changes (for our Windows 2008 R2 setup), we ultimately tried and like IIS 7, and our site is screaming. So, thanks, Charlie, for everything: keeping us from second guessing our application, and turning us on to IIS 7, so we have the super fast site we'd been missing. ⁽²⁰¹¹⁾
Garrett Christian
CTO, Terra Dotta, LLC
When we first approached Charlie with a critical issue affecting our production systems, I certainly expected good results, based on his reputation and extensive writings and contributions to the ColdFusion user community. Indeed he did get us through the vexing issues (due ultimately to configuration settings) and got us on our feet again, but what came as a surprise was the wealth of knowledge that Charlie provided in wide ranging areas of system management and troubleshooting. He pointed us to tools and techniques, shortcuts, and undocumented nuggets of information that we continue to find useful and which have made our engineering and support teams stronger and more able to tackle adverse events.

It's Charlie's patient, methodical attention not just to problems, but his attention to the education needs of his clients, that makes his consultation service unique. He's a gifted communicator and teacher. He starts without preconceptions or assumptions and builds his investigation by observing key diagnostics, all the while carefully questioning and listening, picking out details that reveal the need to give the client more insight to have a foundational understanding of the areas involved.

Charlie's always reasonable, forthright, and honest with his billings. We're glad to have him as a resource when needed, and we will certainly continue to rely on him going forward. ⁽²⁰¹¹⁾
Nicolas Glinoer
Walking men, a digital agency
Our server is doing much better - and your help getting us started with FusionReactor was extremely invaluable - thanks again! While we didn't find any one silver bullet that was bringing the server to its knees, in the process of looking into things based on what we learned during our brief session with you, we ended up optimizing a lot of things afterward (code, configuration, caching, etc.). Being able more readily see the impact of spiders on things was also really helpful.

Our situation is significantly better now. We could not have done it without the insight you gave us into the treasure trove of data provided by FusionReactor. We won't hesitate to get in touch again for our future CF-server needs - it was a pleasure to collaborate with you. ⁽²⁰¹¹⁾

2010

Paul Thompson
Lincoln Investments
You were a big help to us and still are. Our ColdFusion programmers are always using your website as a resource. ⁽²⁰¹⁰⁾
George Chynoweth
A US Military Agency
Charlie is personable, with a ready sense of humor. His technical skills are superb: he can see the big picture and develop all the intricate details to bring it all together into a functioning system. His training skills are very strong: He not only explains and teaches well, he challenges one to think. He handled our heterogenous group with amazing grace (and patience). The entire office was delighted with Charlie's efforts.

I have worked with several world class consultants in this arena, and while all were exceptional, I give Charlie my highest recommendation. I intend to use his services again when I have need. ⁽²⁰¹⁰⁾

2009

Darren Pywell, CTO
Intergral Information Solutions
"I've been working in the IT industry for over 20 years and in all of that time I've never met anyone that I would recommend more highly than Charlie Arehart.
Charlie simply never stops delivering on ways to help and improve things for his clients. Countless times we recevied advice from Charlie which has simply left us saying - "wow, why didn't we think of that!"
Charlie is honestly as good as it gets!" ⁽²⁰⁰⁹⁾
Robert Reil, President
Motorcyclecarbs.com
Thanks for all your help. The server has acted flawlessly since we worked together. I'm so glad you were there with that service. Couldn't have done it without you, was a pleasure, and I always tell CF users about you. ⁽²⁰⁰⁹⁾

2008

Michaela Conley
HPlive.com
I have known Charlie for more than a dozen years. I have found him to be detail oriented and methodical in his approach to creating solutions to complex multi-faceted challenges. His ability to communicate without the use of technical jargon made working with him an exciting opportunity to learn from one leading experts in his field. ⁽²⁰⁰⁸⁾
Byron Shank
Home Reserve, LLC
We were having some trouble with one of our applications eating up memory so I searched Google for 'coldfusion consultant'. I clicked on Charlie's website www.carehart.org and instantly recognized his picture from a number of postings that I had read on Adobe's DevNet page. (Here is an example.)

I sent him an e-mail with a general description of the issue I was having, he responded very promptly.

Working with Charlie has been a joy. He helped me quickly identify loose ends in the server configuration as well as areas in code. The best thing about the experience is that rather than just peek at code and server configurations and then make changes, Charlie walked through both with me over the phone and online. The whole process became a learning experience with my own personal instructor looking over my shoulder.

I feel smart for having chosen Charlie as go-to resource. ⁽²⁰⁰⁸⁾

2007

Karin Stevenson, PowerWeb Development Manager
CyberWolf, Inc.
We started working with Charlie Arehart in February of 2007 when looking for help with some of ColdFusion's more challenging aspects which had suddenly started to affect our operational stability.

Charlie was extraordinarily helpful, not only by working side by side with our IT staff, analyzing even the (to us) most obscure bits and pieces of the ColdFusion setup and configuration on the servers, as needed, but also by pointing us to many tools that have proven invaluable to us since then (from general load testing tools to log analyzers and ColdFusion monitoring).

Thanks to Charlie we were able to understand and remedy issues on multiple levels within short time. His great ability to teach while solving problems makes him an extremely valuable partner to have.

Even today, with a lot more experience under my belt, I consider Charlie my "CF Guardian Angel" and never hesitate to consult him when I have a problem. And I never walk away from a discussion with Charlie without having learned something valuable. ⁽²⁰⁰⁸⁾
Barbara S. ONeal, President/Co-Founder
Centric Web, Inc.
I was very pleased and impressed by Charlie's professionalism and knowledge, not only with FusionReactor and ColdFusion but with other simple shortcuts as well. It isn't often that when you pay for the extra support you actually get someone who really knows his stuff and is willing to really work through the details with you. ⁽²⁰⁰⁸⁾
Charles Garber
Clark Associates
"You were a life saver! Really, the server is performing better than when we purchased it. We hit a record today with # of simultaneous users and stand to do well in sales." ⁽²⁰⁰⁸⁾
Kevin Hamada
Director, Systems Technology (for a Fortune 100 company)

I've worked with Charlie for about six years, but have known of his excellent reputation in the ColdFusion world for about ten. I work for a large Fortune 100 company. My group is responsible for the company's internal web site, which has over 35,000 users and gets close to 2,000,000 hits/day.

Charlie has been a very valuable resource for my group. Working with Charlie is an absolute pleasure. His outstanding communication skills enable him to teach people unfamiliar with the software, as well as explaining technical details to experts in the field.

Charlie has helped with examining and quantifying performance for ColdFusion. He explained the different components and how to measure, examine and understand the feedback from these components. Not only did Charlie find and resolve our bottleneck issue, but he also helped establish a preventative maintenance plan. The results of his interactions enabled us to move from having performance bottlenecks on our web servers every hour to servers that are now running smoothly. ⁽²⁰⁰⁷⁾

See other recommendations as may be listed at Charlie's LinkedIn profile (and perhaps not yet copied here).

Colleagues

"Charlie is an expert in working w/ CF servers and is one of the nicest guys I know in the business. If he doesn't know the answer, he will be honest and won't screw you over. I'd trust Charlie to watch my servers and my kids.", Ray Camden, in a client referral (2017)
"Charlie Arehart is like the master of information organization. Between the User Group TV collection, Object Oriented Programming round-ups, and documents like this one, Charlie seems to have a super power for rounding up all the useful information on a given topic or area of interest and packaging it neatly for our benefit.", in a blog entry by Ben Nadel
"You have such a nice way of making things simple",
Hal Helms, Renowned ColdFusion Expert and Author
"Thanks for the massive volume of wisdom you continuously pour into the community via your articles and involvment in the various community lists. you know you're always welcome to come see us again anytime in AZ!",
Sean Tierney in a comment on a blog entry
"Charlie is one of the most dedicated individuals (if not the most) I have ever had the opportunity to work with. His contributions to the community are second to none and his ability to work with people of all levels is phenomenal. If you want a project to be done correctly and require all angles to be covered then look no further. A true pleasure to do work with!",
Ron West, Director, Product Strategy and Professional Services, PaperThin, Inc. (endorsement as offered on LinkedIn)
"Charlie is a highly reliable and technically skilled individual who doesn't like to leave problems unsolved. He has a reputation for caring about associates' issues, rather than just lending a hand out of obligation.",
Jeff Peters, Owner, Proton Arts (endorsement as offered on LinkedIn)
"Folks, this is the holy grail of "does anybody know of a tool that can do...." if it exists, it's on this list. not only was i suprised by how all-encompassing this list was, but it's also remarkably up-to-date. it's one thing to put forth the effort to compile such a list. it's another to put forth the effort that it must take to maintain it and keep it useful. Twice in the past two weeks i've been duly impressed by two of the many resources that charlie manages. i figure that if nothing else, that deserves a public "thank you" at the very least. so, thanks charlie. i'm sure i speak for quite a few people when i say that all of your efforts on behalf of the community are appreciated.",
Charlie Griefer in a blog entry discussing Charlie's CF Tools/Resources to Consider list.
"[Charlie] goes out of his way to ensure every angle has been explored and that information is presented as clearly as possible so that as large an audience as possible can benefit from the information. He's a tremendous asset to the community, has produced countless excellent presentations and articles and columns and he works very hard to provide much needed, approachable information for people new to ColdFusion.",
Sean Corfield, in comments on a blog entry
"Thanks...to one of the true leaders of our community. I can still remember reading some of his first articles in cfdj, and I was really impressed, because to me, I wanted to learn more, do more, and be as efficient as possible. To me, he seemed [to ask], "how can I help people from any level of experience in cfml, program faster, easier and more efficiently?" From his tips about CF Studio and Homesite, to his different articles on developing. I mean we all knew synax of Cf, but putting it together in a professional and efficient manner isn't something that we had the ability to take classes on. So in bits and pieces, he is the guy that gave you that extra depth, made things faster for you to develop. Gave you some undocumented features and knowledge of how CFML works. I think that it is because of cf writers and programmers like Charlie Arehart [that] I wanted to blog and become a writer. Remember your committment to the cf community: is not just about how many articles or books; it's about your passionate committment to the craft of programming in cfml. Thank you Charlie",
in a blog entry by Craig Rosenblum
"I've been around the CF community since ver 1.5 and I always had great respect for you. The CF community is special because of people like you. We're all grateful you have been, and will continue to be, a part of it.",
Tom Nunamaker in a comment on a blog entry
"I worked with Charlie for a few months while he was CTO at New Atlanta. You'll be hard pressed to find another guy with more knowledge of CF and other web technologies, and a higher standard of morals and professionalism. He is fantastic to work with and has tons of knowledge he doesn't mind sharing.",
Allen Underwood, Consultant, UPS (endorsement as offered on LinkedIn)
"I worked with Charlie for over 3 years and found him to be one of the nicest, smartest and most patient people I have ever met. His knowledge of CFML is second to none and his overall IT knowledge is amazing and ever expanding. Finally, he is a wonderful teacher!",
Brian O'Reilly, VP - Sales, New Atlanta (endorsement as offered on LinkedIn)

Conference/User Group Presentation Attendees

Following are just a few comments from Charlie's various presentations to hundreds of conference and user group sessions related to CF since 1998.

"Charlie Arehart is a really polished speaker. I'm not knocking anyone else, but he's just really smooth.", Terry Ryan in a blog post referring to a CF.objective presentation
"Very well done! Good information clearly presented."
"Fantastic. Presenter was very knowledgeable. Great overview - a bit fast presenting though!."
"Great speaker! fast, informative held attention well."
"Managed to increase speed without losing quality (started late [due to earlier session running long])."
"Charlie presents the material in a manner appropriate for all levels of experience."
"Charlie is an excellent speaker. great presentation."
"Charlie Arehart is always a good speaker no matter what he speaks on."
"Anytime Charlie comes, give him 2 hours!""

Students

The following comments relate to various training Charlie has offered, whether Adobe training in ColdFusion he's offered in many venues since 1999, or in the FusionReactor Training that Charlie wrote and teaches for Intergral, or in other training sessions Charlie has developed.

"Charlie has a very clear and concise presentation style and I felt very enthused about the topic afterwards. I'll certainly be looking at doing the advanced class soon. ", Will Swain, Technical Director, Hot Horse Ltd
"I really enjoyed the webinar! Charlie totally got me pumped about FusionReactor. I am ready to start investigating our web server indepth!", Robin Sexton, Senior Web Developer, The Marco Corporation
"Charlie has a very clear and concise presentation style and I felt very enthused about the topic afterwards. I'll certainly be looking at doing the advanced class soon.", Will Swain, Technical Director, Hot Horse Ltd
""The presenter skillfully tailored the course to the participants and added good value.", Leslie Connor, Project Manager, Fisheries and Oceans Canada
"Thanks for the presentation today, I thought it was excellent! I think that people should be flocking to this - it's obvious to me that many users are just scratching the surface of what FusionReactor can do for them.", Nick Gleason, CitySoft, Inc.
"The presenter had a deep understanding of FusionReactor and did an excellent job in presenting. He tailored the presentation to answer my questions and demonstrated how to troubleshoot a real issue using the tools. The training will really help me apply FusionReactor and do more with our site!", Christina Legris, Business and Internet Systems Manager, State Bar of Wisconsin
"I still cannot believe how much I learn in such little time. I have only met one other instructor that had this style, and I found that it works well with my brain.", One Day Seminar attendee
"Charlie is unique in that he gives outstanding individual attention to each student at all levels. Insures that we understand the material fully before moving forward. A great teacher who shows an honest interest that each of us benefit from his instruction.", Anonymous
"This was the BEST training and instructor I have ever had!", Anonymous
"Excellent intructor. Took time to answer all questions. Brought in a huge amount of knowledge and examples.", Anonymous
"It was truly some of the best instruction I have ever had anywhere.", Anonymous
"Couldn't say enough good things about him", Anonymous
"The instructor was excellent! I was very impressed. He demonstrated a great knowledge of the subject and was able to communicate very well to the class (no matter our level of understanding, experience, or age).", Anonymous
"Best instructor", Anonymous
"Extremely knowledgeable and patient. Able to work with students of differing knowledge levels. Real world usage of the product over diverse platforms", Anonymous
"Charlie is an outstanding instructor", Anonymous
"I've been to many short (3 day) training classes in my days. I think Charlie Arehart is one of (if not) the best teacher. He answers all questions and verbally (or via example) makes the solution easy to understand.", Paul Franco
"Overall the instructor was extremely knowledable in the course and more importantly the application/use helpful tips, etc. His expertise was clearly exhibited though demonstrations and examples.", Renee Mcclure
"Good instructor, comfortable style, easy to work with.", David Sobel
"Instructor was excellent and had good teaching skills and rapport with students in addition to CF expertise!", Terri Phifer
"Charlie is a GREAT instructor. Not only instructs but listens, watches and helps. You got a winner here....", Tom Cropper
"Good instructor, speaks well and keeps you interested.", Steve Shibe
"Charlie was both knowledgeable and good at explaining his knowledge at varying levels of complexity depending on the needs of the class at the moment.", Kevin Broun
"Charlie Arehart was very knowledable, and made the course interesting and entertaining. He answered all of our questions and provided much additional insight.", Mike Cranford
"Charlie Arehart was very knowledgable, courteous, and proactive in assisting students, particulary with the labs. Class began and resumed from breaks prompty. Appreciated information on additional topics he provided on his own initiative.", Hal McCoig
"Charlie was very knowlegeable about the course content and was very patient with and very willing to help any individuals who did not have much HTML experience.", Sandra Henderson

Share your feedback

If you would like to share a comment for Charlie to post here, please feel free to contact him, and thanks!