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In 2002, the industry wrote ColdFusion's obituary. The deceased declined to attend. Twenty-four years later, the platform that "died" is shipping native AI frameworks, the community still gathers in the Vegas desert every year, and I've been writing CFML through all of it - since it was still spelled "Cold Fusion" and the version number was 3.

So I did what any developer with a DAW habit and three decades of opinions would do: I made an album about it.

Tags is a six-song EP from my music project [GamesOver], and it tells the whole story - Allaire to Macromedia to Adobe, the C-to-Java rewrite, the Railo/Lucee schism, BoxLang, and the annual gathering of the faithful in Las Vegas. Six songs. Five genres. One web platform that outlived its own obituary.

The title works three ways, and yes, all three are intentional: the markup tags we've been writing since 1995, the conference badges we'll be wearing at the Bellagio, and the toe tag the industry filled out a little prematurely.

The Tracks

1. Allaire to Nowhere (Americana ballad) - The origin story, told porch-style: two brothers in a Minnesota basement in 1995, an engine that powered half the early web, three corporate weddings, a denominational split, and a grandchild running free. Thirty years of history in one long road - and nowhere never came.

2. Still Running Since '95 (heartland rock) - The survivor's anthem, sung by the code itself. Written off in '02, rebuilt bone-by-bone in Java during the MX era, wearing its third name badge - and still answering requests every night while the frameworks that came to kill it are footnotes. They wrote the obituary in '02; the deceased declined to attend.

3. Query of Queries (slow-burn blues) - A late-night barroom lament where heartbreak speaks fluent SQL: an inner join gone left outer, a deadlock neither lover would release, a table dropped with no rollback. The oldest blues story there is, told in the language of the trade. He ran a query of queries on his heart - every record points back to her.

4. The Server's Got a Brain Now (electro-funk) - The celebration of the new chapter: a thirty-year-old workhorse server takes one Tuesday update and wakes up curious - vectorizing the archive, chatting with the models, asking questions back for the first time in her life. Anyone who has installed ColdFusion 2025 Update 8 knows exactly which Tuesday I mean. Thirty years of answering questions - now she's asking back.

5. Tags in the Desert (synthwave) - The night-drive hymn of the annual pilgrimage: five hundred true believers crossing the desert to Las Vegas, wearing their tags under the neon while the venues change and the gathering goes on. Every year the desert calls the faithful - and the faithful keep the flame.

6. Single Threaded Heart (pop-punk) - The two-minute closer: an earnest sprint about a narrator who can only process one love at a time and refuses to call it a bug. His friends say scale out, run parallel, live a little - he'd rather hang and timeout than divide what's his. One of you at a time - every cycle he's got is yours.

The Pilgrimage

Here's where it gets literal. The Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2026 runs June 22-23 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and my drive from California's Central Coast clocks in at roughly 500 miles - out of the Monterey fog, across the Central Valley, over Tehachapi, through the Mojave, and down I-15 into the neon.

These six tracks were built to be that drive's soundtrack, and the sequencing is the route: the ballad for the quiet farmland miles, the anthem when the road opens up, the blues for the long flat stretch where you start talking to yourself, the funk for the second wind, the synthwave for the desert after sundown - "Highway 15 at midnight, taillights in a line" was written about exactly that final approach - and the pop-punk closer for the moment the Strip comes over the horizon.

If you're making your own pilgrimage this year, the EP is sized for almost any leg of it. And if you see a guy at the Bellagio humming a blues riff about left outer joins, come say hi.

Listen

Tags by GamesOver is distributed via DistroKid and will be available on Spotify, Apple Music, and the usual platforms. (More streaming links coming once distribution clears - check back here or follow along on social.)

https://www.mycfml.com/music/album/tags

And to the platform itself: thanks for thirty years of paying the bills, surviving the obituaries, and giving a songwriter more material than any language has a right to. Still running since '95.