We at Ortus are excited to announce Gavin Pickin as the new ContentBox evangelist.  He has been involved with the Box Community for a very long time and has always brought great ideas and help to the team and product suite.  In his new role, he will lead the evangelism and direction of the ContentBox CMS Platform.  We are also excited to announce our public product roadmap for ContentBox and the general availability of our beta bleeding edge downloads.  So let’s find out a little about him.

Biography

Gavin was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand… before moving to California at the age of 21. When New Zealand’s patchy weather let him go outside, he was constantly playing cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, track and field, almost any sport that he could. When weather kept him inside, curiosity and computers kept him entertained. Gavin took the competitiveness and curiosity with him to University where he won a Senior Prize for Management Science and Information Systems and was invited into the prestigious Honors program, but decided to head abroad for International Experience. Upon completion of his Degree, he left New Zealand for California, where he has lived ever since. Now with a beautiful wife, and 5 great kids, he’s made a lifetime home in California.

Life in Web Development

While studying at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Gavin starting working Part Time for the School of Business as a WebMaster. In his final year of school, Gavin was invited to be part of the first “E-Business Team”, brought together to build a cohesive brand for the University. This is where Gavin was introduced to ColdFusion 4.5, and in the first weekend, he built a full blown app, and never looked back.

After arriving in California, he worked with a small company, helping them grow to become a million dollar company, with a custom designed k12 focused education content management system, which got the attention of the big players. After 6 years, he moved to a bigger company focused more on custom solutions, where he expanded his knowledge and tools as more detailed end to end systems were built, using ColdFusion and Javascript, including hybrid mobile apps with the help of Cordova.

Responsible for all aspects of the development process, from project specification, database design, devops, graphic design, server side and client side applications, Gavin’s experience has allowed him to fit well into any project, and his passion to learn and grow mean’s he is not afraid to tackle new technology.

History in *Box

After working on several custom built frameworks over many years of work with ColdFusion (that show remnants of fusebox remains), Gavin knew scaling his projects would require an adoption of community driven well known frameworks, not only for technical reasons, but for onboarding new developers. This lead Gavin to a ColdBox Bootcamp prior to cf.Objective() in 2013 where he met the ColdBox team and other new Boxers. It seemed like a natural progression, picked it up quickly, and contributed to the ColdBox world with a starter Project ColdBox Koans and presented at the ColdBox Developer week soon after.

Since then Gavin has continued to integrate more of the Box platform into legacy projects and new projects alike, and dive into new technology like TestBox and CommandBox as it came out. Gavin has continued to participate in the community, on Mailing Lists, ColdBox Developer Weeks, and Into the Box, and also guest blog posts and Roadshow presentations.

ContentBox Roadmap

You can view/download the ContentBox Roadmap document by clicking on the links below: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3aRjVTf2SeqUTVIdEREa3NITGM

Our 3.0.0 Beta release is almost complete and the pre-beta binaries can be found in our integration server.