Thank you for a wonderful 2013 Conference

Discussion and announcements related to the BRGroup and ADS conferences.

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Susan Smith
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Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:24 am
Location: Southern California

Thank you for a wonderful 2013 Conference

Post by Susan Smith »

Hi all,

I meant to post this on Saturday night, but unfortunately I arrived home from Boston quite ill (bronchitis, heading toward pneumonia! I went downhill fast!) and have been down for the count ever since. Anybody who spent time with me at the conference should be dosing yourselves with your favorite anti-illness concoction right now! I believe that I picked up this bug on the flight from California to Boston where half the plane seemed to be coughing and sneezing. It must have incubated a bit during the conference. After some anti-biotics and steroids, I can breathe a bit better and crawl out of bed to write this:

Thank you sincerely to all who made this conference possible. The presenters were fabulous this year and I brought back so many wonderful ideas and inspirations, many of which were unexpected!

To George Tisdale: Thanks for highlighting your favorite FNSNAP functions. With the way that this library has grown over the years, it was extremely helpful to have you point out some of the "mustn't miss" features! I heard several people asking you afterwards about some of them, so I know that this was well received. Additionally, I loved the way you started out your report writer presentation with all of the BR building blocks we needed to understand how you were snagging all of the heading, data and format spec information from those BR 4.3 grids, whether it was to ultimately create reports from them with an "FN George" single line of code, or to take those same building blocks and rearrange them any way we want to create other useful utilities. (an export routine immediately came to mind for me!) This was my favorite of all of your presentations over the years because I truly understood what was going on under the hood, and I'm one of those personalities who likes to know how things work. Thank you!

To Gabriel: thank you for making the process of upgrading to BR 4.3 from older BR versions very approachable and manageable, in addition to giving us some needed hints about using the latest version of BR, thank you. Thank you too for a very helpful and useful walk through all of your valuable utilities - from FileIO to ScreenIO to AuditBR and Lexi. I appreciate your generosity in offering so many of these free of charge to the BR community and for giving us a full-featured version of ScreenIO to play with for a few months at no cost. This will give people an opportunity to really try it out and create some useful screens that they can use in their software and therefore REALLY discover its magic. I hope that those of you who take Gabe up on this and try it out will post your questions, issues and thoughts here in the forum. Having gone through this learning curve myself, I know that sometimes there are a lot of questions in the beginning. I'm sure that those of us who use ScreenIO (and the other utilities) regularly will be happy to help here in the forum so everyone can benefit from the conversation. I can assure you that the learning curve is well worth it. I could never think of going back, now that I'm using it. It's that good. Thank you, Gabriel.

To Gordon and Gabriel: thank you for your exciting demonstration of the newest in BR technology for the mobile device market. I think this newest webserver is much easier to use than older implementations of the idea and Gabriel's walk through of a real internet example from start to finish made it real and digestible. I would love to continue this conversation here because there is so much more to talk about with this concept.

Note: we will be having a follow-up online "Goto Meeting" style of mini-conference on this same topic soon. Anybody can join in, even if you weren't at the Boston conference. We are calling these "echo conferences" (thanks John Bowman for the idea!) because they will take a topic that was introduced at a BRG conference, do a bit of a review and go on from there. The first BRG Echo Conference will be on the BR http webserver (aka BR on a cell phone). No dates are set yet. Stay tuned.


Additionally, thank you Gordon for introducing rSync and Delta Copy to us. After suffering from a hard drive failure last year, I am FIRMLY in the camp of those who believe that backup - online and offline - cannot possibly be overdone. I have many layers to my backup strategy now, and these are good FREE solutions that should be of use to many.

John Kievlan, welcome to the group! It was great to meet you and hang out a bit. I still can't believe that you jumped in with both feet and did a presentation for your first conference. I really like the fact that you showed two different sides to version control: that it can be a life saver for multi-programmer shops using online repositories, but that you also demonstrated its usefulness for those of us who don't work with other developers and would prefer to use local repositories (with a good backup strategy of course!) Well done! I hope we get to hear more from you at future conferences.

To Kevin Klappstein: We had several requests for a session on MyEdit debugging, so I know that you made some people very happy. There is so much power in this editor that is so closely tied to BR that it is a shame that some of us don't take advantage of some of those things (like debugging). I use MyEdit, and now I hope to use it more fully. Thank you.

To Ed Singer: Your presentation might have been one of the most unexpected delights in the conference! When you told me that you were going to show your BR 4.3 application, I didn't know what to expect. But I was extremely impressed with the incredible thought and design that has gone into your application - from it's color themes and user interface, to your pop-up calculator, to the way that you used the newest grid features, to the flow and road map of the application itself. Thank you so much for the inspiration. For those of you who didn't come to the conference, you missed something big here. I came away with many examples of ways to "up" the look of my screens to make them look much more professional and also ways to make the interface more flexible for my users, some of whom are "keyboard users" and others who prefer the mouse. Ed's application had it all.

To John Bowman: Although I think of myself as one who uses enumerations a lot, I realize that there are many MORE ways that I can implement them in order to make my application more maintenance-friendly for ME! And if I standardize on some things that I can use across my application, I won't have to worry about having a zillion different variables for the same common values that I use in every single program. Gabriel's FileIO demo helped to make this concept even more real, so between the two of you, I think the topic became very USEFUL to your audience. I also enjoyed your demonstration of the old and new combo boxes and the different ways in which you can use them. That got a nice discussion going! I haven't been using them lately, but while you were talking, I realized that they were the perfect solution for a few of my screens where I am now using too many radio buttons. Radio buttons are great if you only have 2 or 3 choices, but after that, a combo box is a great solution and I love the new one! These are definitely going into my applications.

Welcome (back) to Rick Rooks, another "new" member (sorta). I say "new" but Rick has been to conferences before in the old days. Rick, I enjoyed getting to know you, and I appreciated several opportunities to pick your brain a bit :) Thank you for sharing so readily. I confess that you didn't really feel "new" to me at all. You fit right in to this crazy lovable group!

Thank you to the other members of the BRG Board who have been invaluable:
George Tisdale, Treasurer
John Bowman, Secretary
Pete Klug
Mike Storlazzi


Did I leave anyone out? (I hope not!)

To all of you who participated in our discussions, and Q&A sessions, thank you - thank you - thank you! I get so much from you. None of us went to "Business Rules School". So we only know what we figured out on our own, or what we learned from fellow co-workers. I am continually surprised and inspired by what I learn at these conferences (even things that have been in the language for decades!) that I can make use of. When I first started coming to conferences in 2003, I felt like I was so far behind that I'd never catch up. I was using older versions of BR and I had never even heard of many of the current things in the language. As is the way in this group, several of you took me under your wing (David Blankenship and George Tisdale, in particular) and spent much time mentoring me. Eventually, I learned more and more and incorporated those things in my programs, and the day came where I finally felt like I could understand the majority of the material presented at the conferences. There are certainly some concepts that are still a bit over my head, but I can keep up. This was all because of the unconditional generosity of the people in our group. You are truly special people.

For me, this was one of the best conferences yet in terms of inspiration. I came home with an embarrassment of riches! (And a few too many brownies, but that's a topic for another time.) I am truly grateful to all of you. You are so talented and brilliant. My clients' applications are filled with your brilliance and ideas, so be aware that your reach is far beyond your own offices.

-- Susan
your very grateful and humbled BR Group president
Last edited by Susan Smith on Tue May 07, 2013 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
bluesfannoz
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Post by bluesfannoz »

I second all said! Everyone did a great job!

Including the part about coming down with said nasty bug.

Thanks so much Susan for your hard work and dedication to this group.
Steve Koger
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John
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Post by John »

First I am really excited about becoming line number free before BR 4.4! Thank you Gordon!!!

And I came home with so many individually wrapped brownies that I was able to feed my kid's entire kindergarten class with them and still have some left over!

The presentations we're all wonderful and down right inspiring!! These conferences always revitalize my programmer spirit to an unexpected level! This conference was no exception. Yes always an unexpected level - I don't know how you keep making these things better and better, Susan or how you can possibly get us better presentations next year, but every year (somehow) you do it!

-John Bowman
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