First of all, I would like to thank Steve Bryant for coming up with this brilliant idea. I've spent quite a few minutes reading the posts. It's really interesting as to how diverse these experiences are.
I've always been interested in computers, but more from the "all those people are using computers and I better learn what it's all about" perspective. I remember when my father bought a TRS-80 computer for me and my sister to play with. I would spend time going through magazines and typing in the programs so I could play games. In high school, I had a friend who was in the science and tech program, and I would hang out with her in the computer lab while she played Zork.
So, when I went off to college, I declared computer science as my major as that was the first thing that came to my mind that sounded appealing. Unfortunately, that's when the reality that my math skills was seriously lacking kicked in, and I switched over to journalism (resulting in a better GPA). I got an on-campus job working in the Marketing Department at the Dining Services. There, I was introduced to the wonder of desktop publishing on Macintosh Plus (I still can't quite get over the fact that we had to do page layout in PageMaker on a 9" screen).
Years later, I was in between jobs, and finding that it was increasingly more and more difficult to get a job in desktop publishing, as it was now something that everyone could do right from their office and take the printing job over to the local printer. This was at the time when the Internet was becoming more popular and everyone were setting up their own website. So, I got an HTML book, created some samples, got some freelance jobs setting up websites, and eventually got hired by a small company (which subsequently got bought out by a bigger company which then got bought out by a still larger company) that specialized in collecting and analyzing health and education data for state and federal agencies, and institutions such as HHMI. I continued to do static web page development (all those nested tables and heavy use of FONT tags to get precisely the layout that was needed).
At the time, the company had an in-house scripting language (WebInterchange, WebIC for short) that was very much like ColdFusion; the only difference was that it used "##" as the opening and closing tags. There was a need for more programmers, so they offered workshops to anyone interested in learning this scripting language. I thought this would be a good opportunity, especially as I was getting bored with HTML programming. John Theis was one of the instructors, and I subsequently joined his team. He was one of the best bosses I've ever had and I learned so much about him. I still remember his maxim about how you should always start with a good, well-thought out database as the base; without that everything would eventually fall apart. (If you're still out there, John Theis, thank you!)
The programmer in charge of developing WebIC left without handing over the master key to the source code. Despite that, we continued to use the language, but eventually we switched over to ColdFusion. My team got assigned to a project that required ColdFusion; that would have been sometime in 2000 or so. I believe we started out with ColdFusion 5 and quickly moved to CF MX; that's the version I remember most vividly.
These days, I'm more of a project manager than a developer in the business venture that I'm working on, but I'm still a big fan of ColdFusion and I'm constantly amazed by what it can do, and I continue to believe it has a great future, especially with the wonderful community at its core.