As Rakshith moves on, ColdFusion Product Management past and future
Note: This blog post is from 2021. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.Some of you may heard that late last week Adobe CF Product Manager Rakshith Naresh announced in various online communities that he was stepping down from the role and indeed moving on from Adobe. Here's his post on the Facebook CF Programmers group. As he noted there, he had "found an interesting opportunity outside of Adobe", and he added that "ColdFusion continues to be an important part [of] Adobe and nothing changes for the product with this. Adobe is actively looking to hire a replacement for my role."
Of course I wish Rakshith all the best. He guided the release of CF2021, which many think is one of the best new CF releases in that timeframe, and he will be missed. But time marches on, as does CF.
In this post, I reminisce first about who the past (surprisingly few) CF Product Managers were, and then I muse about what the next CF PM will face, and what all this means for CF going forward.
And indeed Andy Allan mentioned overnight Phil Costa, whose profile ALSO lists him having a PM role for CF in a out the same overlapping years, even with Tim Buntel's time.
I'll do more digging, either for more corroborating evidence of each, or by just trying to reach out to them to pick their brains.
Thanks, and great to be hearing again from folks from the early days.
How I miss the good old ".com days" where CF 2.0 changed everything, allowing us to swiftly build revolutionary sites like Autobytel.com, support Super Bowl level traffic (19x+) and travel (it was pre-COVID after all!) to energized conferences where frameworks like Fusebox and techniques leading to JSON evolved in unofficial side rooms.
I deeply hope that Adobe someday realizes what it has and takes Cold Fusion to another level. Open Source has eaten away at its lead but a company like Adobe can pull that off. It's fans are continuing to cheer it on...
Yours in CF,
Doug Nottage
It's also possible they didn't really have an "official" PM before Dave. They were pretty small back in those days, so it really may have been split duty.