Cincom Smalltalk Digest: June Edition

The Cincom Smalltalk Digest is a monthly publication that provides news, updates and resources to our customers, partners and users. This month’s newsletter includes the following:

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

• Have You Subscribed to the Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions Newsletter?

• How Can You Contribute to Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions?

BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS

• How Using the 3X Methodology Can Help Your Business or Product Group Succeed

• Tips on Using the Most Frequently Used Tool in Cincom Smalltalk

• Component of the Month: ClassCloning

• Be a Part of Our Talented Team!

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

This section of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest is dedicated to our loyal customers and partners.

Have You Subscribed to the Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions Newsletter?

The Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions Newsletter is a subscription-only publication that was created over a decade ago exclusively for customers and partners. This useful publication allows subscribers to quickly scan through Cincom Smalltalk resolutions delivered in the previous month.

Feedback from customers and partners has helped us shape the newsletter into what it is today. Following reader feedback, our product marketing team stepped in to add more information for those who wanted an easier way to keep up with Cincom and Cincom Smalltalk.

With the recent release of Cincom Smalltalk 9.2, there’s no better time to be a subscriber! If you are interested in receiving this monthly newsletter with updates on patches for Cincom Smalltalk, subscribe here.

How Can You Contribute to Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions?

Cincom Smalltalk Support and Engineering appreciate customer feedback on published and pending resolutions. Your feedback on a pending resolution speeds up the inclusion of its solution in future product releases. It also makes it easier to publish the solution to the Cincom Smalltalk Customer community.

A heartfelt “thank you!” from the Cincom Smalltalk group to all who provide this critical feedback for our ongoing product improvement efforts.

BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS

This section of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest is dedicated to new Smalltalkers, freelancers and experienced developers, with informative articles and specific Smalltalk examples for learning new skills or honing existing ones using Cincom Smalltalk.

How Using the 3X Methodology Can Help Your Business or Product Group Succeed

The 3X Methodology is a great place to start for those who are looking for guidance on developing a business plan. Kent Beck discovered this methodology after observing how Facebook did things differently and identifying three key stages of a winning idea. People have ideas for market solutions, but some may not know how to narrow the scope to the best solution. These stages are essential for business success.

The 3X Methodology, also known as “Explore, Expand, Extract,” is a thinking model that can help you better understand and adapt to changing contexts. This is useful in a variety of business settings because it provides direction, focus, and alignment. This methodology can benefit high-level executives, product management, developers, operations personnel, and others.

An idea can evolve depending on where it is on its journey from the Explore stage to the Expand stage and finally to the Extract stage. This includes funding, testing, planning, implementation and even risk management.

• To read more about the 3X Methodology, click here.

Kent Beck is a programmer, coach and mentor of programmers, as well as a public speaker and author. Along with 3X, he’s also created other methodologies like XP (Extreme Programming), TDD (Test Driven Development) and Tidy. Recently he has developed a new methodology he is calling Limbo: Scaling Software Collaboration.

Beck writes: “To scale development, make the changes which propagate between developers (and from developer to production) as small as possible. Hence the name Limbo, where the question is, ‘How low can you go?’”

Limbo is live, shared programming, balancing between two principles:

1. Everyone is working on (and production is executing) the same program, represented by a single abstract syntax tree.
2. No one is allowed to cause others (including users) problems.

Limbo encourages a “make the change easy, then make the easy change” sequence of changes.

Basically, Limbo chops things into smaller, more manageable pieces. In simplistic terms, it’s like looking at the individual pieces of a whole pie. In a practical application, that pie is your application and the individual pieces are components of that application. Limbo then takes it one step further, looking at little slices of each of those components. It’s continuous delivery, working on low-hanging fruit to “make the change easy and then make the easy change.” Sometimes, that “easy change” is a little slice of a component that turns out to be the one thing a customer needs to make them happy.

• To see articles and other research about Limbo, check out Beck’s Google search on the topic: https://www.google.com/search?q=limbo+kent+beck
• To view even more great content from Kent Beck, subscribe to Software Design: Tidy First here: https://tidyfirst.substack.com/

Tips on Using the Most Frequently Used Tool in Cincom Smalltalk

Arden Thomas, the Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, began the Hidden Gems screencast series to showcase shortcuts, tips and techniques that may make it easier for others to use or kickstart their use of Cincom Smalltalk. Arden shares how he utilizes multiple Cincom Smalltalk components, as well as features he uses for his own productivity that he considers “hidden gems” in these screencasts.

The very first screencast he put together in this series was on the Browser. The Cincom Smalltalk Browser is the most frequently used tool in our products, and you can watch this screencast below or click here.

We also have a few Common Tools tutorials on the Cincom Smalltalk Browser for those who want to learn more about the Smalltalk programming language. This overview introduces the browser’s various panes, what they display and how the tool is used.

Watch this informative tutorial below or click here.

You can also find and explore classes using the Cincom Smalltalk Browser. To learn how this is done, watch part two of this Common Tools tutorial below or click here.

Component of the Month: ClassCloning

This month we are highlighting ClassCloning, which is a utility to clone a class with a new name. For times when you want a similar class as a base for modifications, and it doesn’t make sense to subclass, ClassCloning is a quick and easy tool to use.

Here are a few resources to help you:

• Watch this Hidden Gems screencast for a demonstration of ClassCloning.
• Learn more about other Contributed Components.
• Apply using the Contributed Application Form if you have created something that you believe would be valuable and interesting to other Smalltalk developers or could help attract new Smalltalk users.
• Follow these guidelines for final documentation of your contributed work to help developers find, understand, appreciate and use it.

Be a Part of Our Talented Team!

If you are a software engineer who wants to live where you want and take your rewarding career with you, then Cincom might be the place for you!

The Cincom Smalltalk group is looking for several developers to join its global development team to develop Cincom Smalltalk. 

We have a variety of people like outdoor cyclists, photographers, coffee drinkers, tea aficionados, whisky connoisseurs, volunteers, yogis, Peloton members, chanters, people who sail the seven seas and those who climb the tallest mountains. We have happy people, people with young children, people who send children off to the next room to virtually attend university courses and folks who are ready to travel the world for vacation and in some cases, code using their favorite language, Smalltalk, while sitting home or traveling the world. In our team, you could find a friend or perhaps the other three members for your adventure race team!

We have several new openings, and some of the job qualifications include:

• A passion for and experience with Smalltalk (Cincom Smalltalk experience a plus)
• Language design that involves Smalltalk
• Experience with assembly language, possibly JIT, is a plus.
• Background in developing quality Smalltalk code and delivering product feature documentation
• Problem-solving skills and a can-do attitude are essential.
• Must be able to work individually and in a distributed team environment.
• Significant C experience
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) experience
• Experience with API calls and platform libraries on various operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix)

Note: The Cincom Smalltalk Development Team is a fully remote team and an equal opportunity employer.

We offer a competitive base salary plus benefits.

If you are a software engineer who might be interested in joining a product group that is ready to share Smalltalk with the world via clean code, cool campaigns and much more, please submit your resume/CV and cover letter letting us know why you want to join our team, as well as salary requirements, to Suzanne Fortman.