Pretty certain we were at the same conference. There development practices horrified the group I was with in the audience. At a time that a new competitor appeared (Facebook) they made the fatal mistake of rewriting their software in dot Net. No new features for a year or more. Joel Spolsky wrote a pretty famous essay about the wisdom of doing that.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Performance was the feature. Friendster should have been social network of that era but they couldn’t scale and had to shutdown new user registration. Same thing happened to Twitter but they had no competitor in short form social networking.

Pownce?

"Twitter on steroids" [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce

I remember when Kevin Rose of Digg made a lot of noise to launch this and then it very, very quickly died.

Thanks for this one, it encapsulates a feeling I've had for a while but could never verablize so well.

I live by that blog post.

I had an older friend that worked at CF when I was a teenager. He taught me a bit about relational databases and some other important stuff as he was one of the only developers I knew growing up.

I remember him telling me how I was wasting my time building in php/MySQL since CF was the future and serious companies wouldn't be looking for php developers. Glad I never pulled the trigger and bought their expensive IDE.

No expensive IDE was necessary and there are open source servers now. Regardless, you made the right choice.

> No expensive IDE was necessary

This is most certainly debatable

That said, that IDE was legit. It was comparable to IntelliJ. I want to say I used it over Komodo quite frequently.