"Never re-invent the wheel" - one of my college professors would actually fail us if we didn't re-use or share code! He was way ahead of his time. Some of the things that I miss about of college was the sense of community we used to have. My major was IT, and a group of us would regularly, in an ad hoc kinda way, meet to brainstorm ideas, solve problems and have fun doing it. (ok I also miss the beer games, chasing members of the opposite sex and skipping early classes after a long night out, but that's not exactly relevant to this post)

There's no doubt about it, if you want to get the most out of your specialty in the IT world, you need to be able to brainstorm ideas with others in that specialty. Alot of times, we don't just need answers to a specific problem, but we need know what we DON'T know about our specialty.

For this group, that specialty is ColdFusion, but we don't want it to end there. We'd like to consider ourselved "solutions" oriented. So, if that means touching on other technologies that are somewhat related, then we'll do it.

One of the best ways to get exposed to new ideas is to attend conferences (like Macromedia MAX, for example), but these days, with the corporate purse strings pulled tight, that's just not an option for most of us.

However, for the princely sum of 1 or 2 hours every month (and being force fed free pizza), we can offer a year round alternative. If you haven't done so already, check out the meeting schedule, and RSVP to domalley@cfugitives.com