The Online ColdFusion Meetup

We're happy to announce the next Online ColdFusion Meetup to be held Thursday Oct 8th at 12pm US Eastern Time, UTC-4:

"From Monthly Meltdowns to Daily Deploys: Taming Legacy ColdFusion with Feature Flags", with Guust Nieuwenhuis

Meeting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oWlIa3-pl8&list=PLG2EHzEbhy0-QirMKgSxhjkUyTSSTvHjL

TOPIC DESCRIPTION: (provided by the speaker)

Every ColdFusion developer has been there: you’re tasked with updating a legacy codebase where a single change in a CFC might unexpectedly break a scheduled task or a reporting module miles away.

The result? “Deployment Anxiety” and a release calendar that moves at a snail’s pace. In this session, I will share our team’s journey of breaking free from the “Big Bang” release cycle using Feature Flags. We will walk through the evolution of our strategy—starting with a simple, homegrown CFML database toggle and eventually scaling to a sophisticated implementation using Unleash.

Key takeaways from this session include:

- The “Safety Net” Strategy: How to wrap high-risk code in flags to ensure you can “kill” a failing feature in milliseconds without a rollback.
- Testing in Production: Why the best staging environment is actually production (if you have the right toggles in place).
- The Homegrown vs. Pro Debate: A look at our migration from a custom FeatureService.cfc to an enterprise flag management platform.
- Gradual Rollouts: How to release a new module to 5% of your users to monitor performance before a global launch.
- Practical CFML Examples: See code snippets of how to implement flag checks within your logic and how to handle “flag debt” so your code stays clean.

Whether you are maintaining a 15-year-old legacy app or building a modern CFML API, you’ll leave this session with a roadmap to release faster, safer, and with significantly less stress.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER(s): (provided by the speaker)

Guust Nieuwenhuis is a Full Stack Web Wizard with experience in a wide range of technologies. Over the last couple of years, he has been involved in projects for various clients like the European Commission, NSHQ (NATO), Adobe, AS Adventure Group, NS (Dutch railways), CZ Groep, Proximus, Avery Dennison, ZilliZ and Mediagenix. Through We Are North, he does 'Customization-As-A-Service'. They don't build from scratch, but find the best solutions out there and tailor them to their customers' business needs. In doing so, they never lose sight of the goal of the client.

In his free time, Guust plays the double bass and drums, crosses the forest on his mountain bike and coaches the youth at his local football club (where he's a board member as well). He likes spending time with his wife and two kids or meeting friends for a chat, game or drink. When Guust still has some time left, he mainly spends it behind his computer to fulfil his hunger for the latest trends in IT.

RECORDINGS:

All meetings are recorded. As a Youtube live meeting, the URL offered here is the link to the recording as well. But the URL will also be posted after meeting at https://recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com, and via the Youtube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG2EHzEbhy0-QirMKgSxhjkUyTSSTvHjL).

WANT TO PRESENT?

We welcome and indeed seek presentations from anyone wishing to speak about any projects regarding or tangentially related to CF. For more, see https://speak.coldfusionmeetup.com.