Adobe Community Experts

Brian Meloche

Cleveland, Ohio

Biography

A veteran ColdFusion developer since 1998, Brian Meloche is a longtime contributor to the Adobe community. He co-founded and currently manages the Cleveland ColdFusion User Group, founded, former manager and co-manager of the Cleveland Adobe Users Group (formerly the Cleveland Macromedia Users Group), and founded the West Virginia Macromedia User Group, now called KVWILD.  He has also been involved in several efforts to help bring the user group communities closer together, and has mentored several user group managers get their groups going.  Brian has also written several articles for the ColdFusion Developer's Journal and Fusion Authority.

Brian has been in IT for many years.  He started out while being a co-op student at the University of Waterloo in Computer Science, where his co-op work terms had him working on mainframes and building complicated spreadsheets (for the time) and databases using Lotus 1-2-3, dBase III and DataEase.  Before graduation, he switched to a BA program and left IT, first trying the financial sector, and then trying to make it as a screenwriter in the early to mid nineties.  His one claim to fame during that period was that he sold a story idea to Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine (although he's not listed in the credits).  Realizing it would take him longer than he wanted to break in as a Hollywood writer, he went back to school, going into the Illustration - Technical program at Seneca College, where he graduated with high honors. At Seneca, he learned computer graphics, graphic design, video and one little HTML course that re-ignited his IT career.  He started his web career as a Toronto-based freelance web designer, but over the course of a few years, his Computer Science background solidified his path as a web developer.  After a few years working with Perl, PHP and ASP, he settled on ColdFusion, and hasn't looked back.  Brian still does a lot of web design these days, and his grasp of Dreamweaver, CSS, JavaScript, Fireworks and Photoshop has helped him develop user interfaces with an AJAX and DHTML front end and a ColdFusion back end.  His ability to function as both a web designer and developer has served him well.

A Windsor, Ontario native, Brian moved to the U.S. in 2000 late in the dot-com boom, and survived the dot-com bomb, working as a consultant at various companies throughout the mid-west and Southern U.S.  Since early 2004, Brian has been Senior Web Developer at a successful wholesaler in Cleveland, Ohio, where he has been extensively involved in several large enterprise web projects using ColdFusion.  Brian lives in Cleveland with his wife, Julie, as well as several dogs and cats they have rescued.

Credits

Articles
ColdFusion Developer's Journal
Fusion Authority.

Adobe User Groups

Cleveland CFUG
Cleveland AUG

Discussion groups

Mach-II
ColdSpring
Fusebox
CF-Talk