Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These are the four mathematical operations I was taught during my childhood education, and their operators, +, -, *, /, are very familiar. I was not taught %, the modulus operator, which I recently discovered can be quite useful and interesting in its own right.

Okay, so this is slightly embarrassing, in that I'm writing about a "feature" that was added in ColdFusion 8... so, over 11 years ago. I'm talking about the compound assignment operators: +=, -=, *=, /=, and %=.

One of my goals for the coming months is to improve my proficiency with Java; that is, to put some real knowledge behind my current patchwork understanding, pieced together over the years via trial-and-error.

Many thanks to the (growing) team at Ortus Solutions for their tremendous work with this year's Into the Box conference. True to form, it was filled with in-depth sessions and a relentless emphasis on modernization, best practices, and advanced tooling.

My goal here was to put together a script for easily setting up a Swarm on DigitalOcean. As with the previous post, I wanted to do this without relying on Docker Machine, so again, I leaned on doctl to do the heavy lifting.

Months ago I ambitiously began a series of posts about setting up and deploying a production Docker Swarm. Well, I intended it to be a series. I didn't actually get around to writing a second article until now, and for better or worse, this will basically serve as a revision of that first post, in which I documented using Docker Machine to script host creation.

I blogged, in two earlier posts, about installing and deploying FusionReactor Cloud to monitor CFML applications on Docker Swarm. The next step is to to configure its updated alerting system to let you know if anything is amiss.

Following my previous post about setting up FusionReactor on Docker Swarm, we encountered an issue with deployments failing to report. After a dozen or so emails with the fantastic FusionReactor support team, everything is working again. Here's what I learned.

Moving a standard ColdFusion installation to Docker Swarm requires rethinking - and frequently rewiring - portions of our infrastructure. Today, that means reconfiguring how we deploy FusionReactor to monitor our applications.

It's not difficult to use ColdFusion spreadsheet functions (e.g. spreadsheetNew() and cfspreadsheet) in Lucee. Nevertheless, I managed to make a handful of mistakes while implementing them. I've catalogued my missteps here, along with the approach that actually worked.