2011 International Spectrum Conference Feedback
Interview with Kelvin McLay
IS: We are talking with Kelvin McLay from Balance Business Systems in New Zealand. That's a long way to come for a conference. What caused you to decide to come all this distance?
Kelvin: I used to come every second year. I started doing that about 18 years ago. The first one I went to was in Sydney. But as a small company, we fluctuate between the one of the three staff people, over there I don't find we get a lot of input from our distributors. We don't really know what's going on unless we make the effort ourselves. In order to stay up with what's going on, what's available, what people are doing, this was the logical place to come. It wasn't anything specific. It was that practically everyone was here.
IS: Did you have a particular objective? Or were you looking for a particular type of product or tools in particular?
Kelvin: I canvased my customers to see what they particularly want. So I came with a list of questions looking for certain tools. It's very hard to think of of any specific ones at the moment. Like replication was a big one. Visual report writers and visual tools are always relevant. Because we're still a character-based app. We need to make that step sometime soon. I'm also keen to use contractors to do a chunk of it rather than do it myself. And that means the contacts I have made here in the past, and I keep refreshing, are actually quite important to me.
IS: Has the conference met your objectives so far?
Kelvin: Yes it has.
IS: As a MultiValue developer, would you recommend other MultiValue developers come to the conference?
Kelvin: I'm surprised there aren't more people from Australia and New Zealand. Very surprised. I would recommend it. I think some of the bigger database vendors should also be here, but they're not. It would be good to have them here just so we could ask some questions and put a face their product, even though they're not really likely to sell anything here. I thought they should've been here just as a measure of PR.
IS: Even if it's just making themselves even more accessible to their own customers?
Kelvin: Exactly. Yeah. And probably because of that not just salespeople here but technical guys. Be able to pick their brains, you know. What do you think of this idea? And I think you would be huge theater.
IS: And what about the sessions? Has the content of the sessions been useful to you?
Kelvin: Yes, they're always useful. The trouble is that the most useful ones are on at the same time as the other most useful ones.
IS: That's a problem we haven't been able to solve yet.
Kelvin: You can't solve it. In some of them go to one and you say, "That was a mistake; I should've gone to a another one." Big decisions.
IS: Any particular type of sessions or specific topics that you would like to see the next time you make it back?
Kelvin: No. I think that this time was pretty good.
IS: When we started talking, it sounded like one of the big things was the ability to network with other MultiValue developers in addition to the exhibits and sessions that you come for. Is that a fair statement?
Kelvin: Yeah. Because I come every second year, there's a bunch of guys who come every second year. You don't keep in contact during those two years, but you know they're there. If you have a question, I could e-mail them and say, "What do you do in this?" And you know they'll answer. So the networking is really important; it's probably 50-50 networking versus content. Really. You take one of those halves away, I probably wouldn't come.
Interview with Baker Hughes
IS: We are talking to Baker Hughes of Mauser Electronics. What convinced you to come to the conference? Why are you here?
Baker: There are initiatives that Mauser has on the map for this year and coming years, so their commission was to go out there and find and see the tool sets that could be of interest to us to get our business further down the road and to perhaps accelerate our development cycle. Instead of hand coding things, tools that help us do that. And also just to network with other people who are doing the things we want to do so we can learn from them about the hazards, about their successes, about their experiences that would keep us out of the sand pits. Mainly those two things. Tool acquisition and networking.
IS: Anything in particular that you're looking for? And if so did you find it?
Baker: Yes. We were looking for some specific things, as there are some specific projects. In fact, we have a list of things that we were to explore. Off of that list, I think we had some conversations with people that covered most of the topics. There were a few of the vendors that didn't show up this year. And that's their own fault if they didn't show up, because they may have missed some opportunity to talk with us. We do have some increasing requirements for, like, data resilience and data recovery. So we are looking for some help there. To answer the question, did we see the tools? I think we saw some things that are going to be in the running.
IS: Has the conference met your expectations?
Baker: It has exceeded my expectations. It's amazing to me all the experience and knowledge that shows up at this conference. You get value not just from talking to the vendors or the providers or the guys that are presently wearing a consultant hat — which many of us have done at times. But you also get a lot of value from sitting across the table from somebody that's done the same thing, or they're about to do something, that you've already done. You get a tremendous value out of that. So it has exceeded my expectations in that way, to be alble to talk with people.
IS: As a MultiValue developer, would you recommend that other developers attend the conference?
Baker: Yes. In fact, I'd be willing to give up my seat to get some younger guys here. And other years, have some other guys come back. This one of our goals. I came with my associate Austin Turner, and we want to do this so well this year that they see the value, and they want to send us or somebody back next year so this is a regular occurring thing that people from our shop show up here.
IS: What about the content of the sessions? Was that useful?
Baker: Yes it was. I think that I'm especially thankful that even some guys that were vendors who were here presenting a product, especially talking about Martin, he gave content that was useful to you, say in the area of data resilience, whether you buy his product or not. In fact, I immediately saw some vulnerabilities we have in our backup methodologies because of the way we do things. So I got value whether I take a serious look at his product or not.
IS: We're glad that the sessions were useful.
Baker: Now some of them could've been a little more mature in the material that they presented. Some of the coding examples they presented were, I think, almost an insult to the guys sitting there. A little too simplistic. I guess it's good for for those who didn't know anything about the language. So if it was new technology to some people, but I think that nowadays it probably comprises maybe 30% of the developers that show up here, where they just haven't ever seen a certain language. I think most everybody has seen PHP or Java. They've seen some form of it by this point.
IS: What sort of sessions would you like to see next year?
Baker: Definitely on the application side for us. We don't send hardware people to things like this. So probably more on the mobile thing. I'd say more web stuff. I question in my mind whether there are other players who work here already. And I guess there are a few. I think those folks should come to the party so that the pool here has all the competitors, and you could do more analysis by going from session to session and talking person-to-person. So more of the web, more on mobile. Database optimization. Even query optimization. There's a lot of folks who have a lot of legacy reports and or executes scripts that they constructed in a Basic program. And a lot of it is old and probably not optimized. So there could be some sessions on optimizing our database stuff that we do. So challenging the old hands that may think all their MultiValue stuff is passé, and they've been doing it for so long that it works perfectly. And they may not realize that there is a lot of speed enhancement they can give to the user.
IS: There've been a lot of changes since 1976 when some of these programs were originally written haven't there? I imagine you would like to see that platform specific, since each platform optimizes differently?
Baker: Maybe so. I mean some of the tricks could be the same. General things on optimization, optimizing select statements. Things such as are you using indexes properly? Are you building certain kinds of indexes?
IS: And then we always like to ask, what do you think could be done better?
Baker: Good question. One thing that comes to mind would be if were certain rooms that were made available for open discussion. Maybe if it could be announced that there's going to be an open discussion on a specific topic. Or a Q&A with a panel, maybe some veterans who have been at it for while. And people can ply them with questions on a specific topic. Sort of like a developers chit chat session where people just let their hair down. And you sit down being got honest and people can do anything from asking you questions about some of the topics we discussed here, like optimization, or how do you face this problem, or we're considering a GUI product or a GUI project and what do you think of this tool, or how does this tool compared to that one?
IS: Let's wrap up by talking about TEXMUG (Texas MultiValue Users Group). Now you were instrumental in, or the founder of TEXMUG, if I recall correctly. Why did you do that? Why a user group? The general wisdom at the time was that user groups have outlived their usefulness. And yet, we see that TEXMUG seems to be going strong.
Baker: Well, I think we have reached critical mass finally in TEXMUG. It took us a little while. But we are achieving some consistent numbers, and we are having some of the same faces show up, and people are growing friendships. And that's sort of the basis. It's the personal connectedness that people feel to other users in the area. Where you pick up the phone or you send them an e-mail and you say, I'm facing this problem. What about it? We all have those people, and they may be across the world or across the country now. But to develop those in a regional area is what we envisioned. Our vision was to combine the virtual user group, which we all are probably a member of one or more of those, with a meet-up type group where you actually go and sit down face-to-face and talk about a specific topic. And so that to me was the vacuum. Sometimes people don't know all the people that are the that are the players in the community. So by having a meet-up, you introduce your friend to this other guy and now he knows that guy does the stuff I need to do and he's already doing it. There's the benefit of that just as there is right here. It's just on a more local scale. And some people can come to that who will never show up at International Spectrum. Or they'll never go, or be permitted to go, to even one of their specific industry conferences. But they can take their own time to come and sharpen their skills at a local user group.
Interview with Austin Turner
IS: We are speaking with Austin Turner of Mouser Electronics.What convinced you to come to the conference? Why are you here?
Austin: Well, I had heard about it some. But I didn't know Mauser was sending anyone until they asked me if I would like to come. I said, sure. I'd like to come. See what else is out there and how things are going. They were kind enough to provide us with a nice list of goals and information that I would need to try to find any answers I could to. And to come out here and meet a lot of people and learn about what is going on in the MultiValue world. It's very exciting here.
IS: Other than the list that work gave you, did you yourself have any particular objective in mind? Or were you looking for something in particular?
Austin: Yes. There actually is one thing that I am looking forward to learning about tomorrow. That's the PHP with MultiValue. My degree is actually in networking, and I ended up going into programming. I've been programming longer than I have been networking, but my degree was in networking. And I've always been a big fan of UNIX and open source solutions, stuff like that. I honestly do think the future of software development lies in open source development and on charging for services rather than charging for software. So I was excited to hear Charles Baruch mentioning some of the stuff about getting more involved in the open source movement.
IS: How did you end up in MultiValue? Not to put too fine a point on it, you're one of the younger members here. You don't have to dye your hair. We are always lamenting about not having new blood. So how did we snag you?
Austin: I had been working on web sites in Fort Worth when I got deployed with the United States Army. When I got back, the recession had just started. I decided, you know, I really need to go to a company that employs a little more than five people. So I applied at Mauser, and they had an entry-level position for UniVerse. I thought, that sounds kind of interesting. I'll see what they've got with that. While interviewing with them, they gave me a choice between .NET and UniVerse. I had already let my biases be known, so I thought, you know what. UniVerse doesn't sound bad. And the more I talked to them about it, it sounded really interesting. I had actually worked previously in both Microsoft SQL and MySQL, and in both of those databases I had used my own little kludges to make some fields multivalued before I knew what MultiValue was. Basically, I'd throw my own little delimiter in there so I could store multiple values in a single field. When I found out that there are actually databases that supported that natively, I got kind of excited and thought, this sounds pretty cool. I'd love to learn more about it. I'm a big fan of learning new languages too. So it was exciting getting to learn about this thing, and about MultiValue being one of the industry's best kept secrets. I think there's some truth to that, because there's a lot of stuff you can do with it that's very powerful. But I had to find it first.
IS: It doesn't sound like you have any regrets.
Austin: I think the only things I miss — actually I was talking to Martin earlier and finding out that Open QM addresses them. Such as object-oriented programming, which is something that I know in the City of community you hear a lot of, well you know that's kind of academic. Or it's not that big of a deal. It's another way of programming.I don't know if the generation that is currently working primarily in MultiValue has heard all that much about MVC, the Model View Controller model where you separate everything. Objects help with that quite a bit. So you actually create your object to do all your business logic, and it abstracts that away from having that even interfering with with your actual display.
IS: So has the conference met your expectations so far?
Austin: I actually hadn't formulated too many expectations. It's my first conference.
IS: Okay, let me phrase the question differently. From a professional standpoint, do you think it was worth your time?
Austin: Oh yes. It's definitely been valuable. Basically learning about some of the products out there, and finding out that there is some stuff that will already do some of the things we've talked about back at Mauser. We have a habit of home growing a lot of stuff. But sometimes it pays to look and weigh the cost of a product versus the cost of developing a product, especially when it's only for in-house use. So it's been beneficial learning about some of the stuff that is currently out there.
IS: What about the sessions? Has the content of the sessions been useful?
Austin: Yes, I'd say so. There's been some really interesting information that would come out. The one I'm looking forward to the most I've got to admit isn't until tomorrow. So I can't say anything about it yet.
IS: Kevin King's PHP session?
Austin: I'm looking forward to finding out about what kind of connection he's using to get into PHP and everything.
IS: If you are able to come back next year, are there any particular topics or sessions that you would like to see added?
Austin: I did notice that that there is a very large representation of .NET technology and implementations. It would be really nice to see other other interfaces to languages such as Java. I mean, I know there's one or two classes on Java and the one on PHP. But it would be nice to see other programming languages that you can interface into a MultiValue database. And more classes regarding how to set all that up and other technologies that would work with them.
IS: Do you feel that you had ample opportunity to network with other MultiValue professionals?
Austin: Oh yeah. Definitely. I'm coming away with plenty of business cards and phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
IS: As a newcomer to MultiValue and with a good educational background in the "more modern" technologies, do you see yourself continuing as a MultiValue developer?
Austin: Well I would like to think that pretty much any language that I work in that I will continue to try to keep up with the language and continue to use it. And I don't see myself leaving Mauser in the near future, so I definitely plan on continuing to use it there, that's for sure. I like to leverage whatever languages I do learn. MultiValue is really good at doing certain things, but if there's anything it's not quite as good at as something else, such as regular expressions. I'd love to see implemented. I haven't ran into it yet, but if there are is a MultiValue Basic implementation of regular expressions, that's another one of those things that's on my wish list. I find myself using a lot of Perl for that. Perl and PHP both are good.
IS: One final question. As a younger professional with a computer degree which is fairly recent I would assume — within the last five years?
Austin: Yes.
IS: What was your reaction when you first walked in and saw everybody sitting here using green screens?
Austin: Well to be honest, at first, before I started learning anything about the language, I probably thought for a split second, what did I get myself into? It wasn't so much the green screens that worried me, but the everything being in ALL CAPS, which I found out since then, is not an actual requirement. That's more of a holdover from when it used to be a requirement. I know a lot of developers my age and probably younger now are more accustomed to using camel case in our development. And IDE's are handy.
