I was an on-site support tech for a software company who wrote software for tracking market data for trading companies around Wall Street. The company used a huge MS Access "app" to track our knowledge base and customer support requests. The app obviously took a ton of time to develop but was slow and difficult to use and required a weekly upload / merge to the main office in Colorado.

So one day while strolling around downtown after lunch, I randomly happened upon some guy selling business and programming books on a table on the sidewalk (on Broad Street for those familiar). I bought a book on Cold Fusion 4 for $20 and over the next two months put together a prototype in my spare time that was a slick interface on top of the Access Database.

It was a hit with the NY office, and after about a year of working on it in my spare time, the whole company started using it. They replaced the Access app with my intranet and hired a SQL server guy to manage the database behind it. They didn't want me to leave my on-site support position because I was doing really well with it, so I ended up splitting my job - half time as a tech, half as a programmer.

That company, which was incredibly successful at the end of the 90s, has since shrunk from 150 or so employees around the world to less than 10. From what I understand they're still using that old Cold-Fusion based intranet I wrote all those years ago.

After I got laid off I moved on to PHP because I couldn't afford CF on my own.

AS3 remains, to this day, one of my favorite programming languages. I had really hoped JavaScript would start to resemble it eventually.