Charlie's Consulting and Training Services

If you're a CFML shop (ColdFusion, BlueDragon, Railo, etc.) with any challenges, where you'd like someone to look over your shoulder (either on-site or remotely), Charlie is available and interested in helping. (If you're at all uncomfortable about remote support, please see the discussion below.)

ColdFusion Consulting - Short-term, Long-term, Beginner/Advanced

With 11 years experience working with ColdFusion shops and developers helping solve nagging problems, he can help :
  • tune poorly performing systems
  • solve nagging crashes, restarts, etc
  • install, administer, and/or configure servers
  • troubleshoot code
  • recommend coding techniques
  • help developers work more productively with editors, other resources
Bottom line: if you have a problem related to CF, Charlie may be able to help, or perhaps can point you to someone else or other resources to get you going. He can also help with training, whether custom or the Adobe CF training, as discussed below.

Charlie's available as consultant for short-term (hours, days) assistance at the rate below, or he can be hired on retainer with a preset budget you can determine. Contact him for a initial referral session to determine how he can help solve your most pressing challenges.

He also welcomes occasional email questions directly and will answer them without charge as he can, as time permits and if the question can be answered quickly. (He also contributes his time to many mailing lists, forums, and user groups.)

Remote Consulting: Looking Over Your Shoulder

You may be suspicious or even reluctant about remote consulting. If he's to help you look at your problem over the web, does that mean you need to open ports for remote desktop or VNC-type sessions? No! You don't need to open any ports or create any login for him. Instead, we'll use Acrobat Connect, which works over any browser.

He can see whatever you choose to let him see. If you need to remote into a server from your development desktop, again, you do that as normal and he just watches. He never obtains any authentication information for your servers unless you choose to give it to him. This is about working together, all with the goal of helping you help yourself and become more self-sufficient. (Of course, if there's some situation where you just want to give Charlie some responsibility to take care of something for you, that's a possibility as well.)

"What if we're in another country?"

Your being in another country should not be a hindrance from Charlie helping (in fact, if your exchange rate is favorable you will find that paying Charlie in US dollars is a bargain for you, such as in England where the Dollar tends to be worth half the Pound.)

Also, as for talking with each other, besides traditional phone calls, we can use either the Voice over IP solutions in the shared desktop solutions discussed above, or we can use something like Skype or Google Talk, if you'd like.

While Charlie is in the US Eastern time zone (GMT -5), he's flexible in making arrangements (in advance) to work with you during what would be an odd hour for him.

ColdFusion Training

If you may have any training needs for your CF developers or administrators, Charlie's also been teaching ColdFusion classes since 1999, and been an instructor and speaker for over 25 years. Whether you want the fixed Adobe CF classes or some customized training (including some unique classes he has and is working on), let him know how he can help. He also offers online training for the folks who make FusionReactor and FusionDebug.

Rates

Charlie's rates for consulting are US $175/hr. Where many consultants expect to be brought in for a minimum of months or weeks, he's happy to help in as little as hours or even 15 minutes. His goal is to help make you self-sufficient, so his help is often more than just solving your problem but helping educate you as well.

Indeed, he also offers training, whether on-site or over the web, whether for a group of developers or even one on one, at the same consulting rate. (If you're an Adobe Authorized Training Center, his rate for offering the Adobe CF courses is $US1,000 per day, plus travel.)

Technical Background

His 11 years of ColdFusion experience and accomplishments are listed elsewhere here.

As additional background, his previous 15 years (1982-1997) were in enterprise (very large scale) database systems, both development and administration, including the same sort of writing, speaking, mentoring that he now does in web app development. He worked on some of the largest databases in the world at the US Health Care Financing Administration (now CMMS, then with 60 billion records) and the Australian Department of Social Security (now Centrelink).

It's amazing how much of that prior experience (building interactive applications and managing them and the database in a mainframe environment called Model 204) translated to the web and CF.

Specialties: ColdFusion/BlueDragon; Troubleshooting; Tuning; Training; Administration; Tools (Monitoring, Debugging, and more); Ajax (Spry, etc.); J2EE (JRun, WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss); .NET; SQL Server 6.5/7/2k/2k5; SQL Server 2005 Report Builder

(Enter consulting room when invited)