Cincom Smalltalk Digest: November Edition

Welcome to the November 2022 edition of the Cincom Smalltalk™ Digest. 

In this month’s newsletter, you will find the following:

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

• A Tip for Your Year-End Budget
• How Can You Contribute to Cincom Smalltalk Product Direction?

BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS

• Why Is Productivity with Cincom Smalltalk a Key Factor for JPMorgan?
• What Is Product Management’s Favorite Hidden Gem?
• Component of the Month: DomainMaster
• Be a Part of the Cincom Smalltalk Team!

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

A Tip for Your Year-End Budget

Adam Beck, Director of Marketing at CADENAS PARTsolutions, recently wrote:

“One thing that drives me crazy is seeing money go to waste. If you’re like me, you probably have some ‘use it or lose it’ budget left over for the last few weeks of the year. If you don’t use it, it goes to waste. If you throw it at something just for the sake of spending it, that can be pretty wasteful too.”

In his blog post, Adam shares a few tips that are good advice for all of us to take. One tip that resonates with Cincom Smalltalk customers and partners is the ability to find opportunities to spend now for work that can be delivered later. 

The end of the year is a critical time, and you are often preoccupied with closing deals and strategizing for a strong new year. An unexpected project in the coming year is the last thing you have time or energy for. So, look for ways to spend your extra budget on products or services that you can use when you need it most. As Adam says, consider this like a layaway for the future: paying with funds now for future maintenance time so you don’t have to find that money when a need arises.

As a Cincom Smalltalk customer or partner, we want to introduce several ways that you can create a “layaway” with us—wisely investing in the success of your company or application, while planning for the future. Consider this to be similar to an insurance plan. If something happens to your application and you want a proof of concept or need a specialized fix, you’ve already paid for that access and can pull from it without having to go through a new approval and justification process.

For example, this “layaway” can be used for things like:

• Product Upgrades
  Don’t risk a critical upgrade to a learn-as-you-go, in-house approach. Our senior consultants know the small, impossible-to-document steps that make the difference between an unresolved task and a completed process.
• Performance Enhancement
  A performance-enhancement service reveals how a team is using Cincom Smalltalk, which aspects of the tool they are not using and how they could energize so many more existing capabilities.
• Troubleshooting
  Whether it’s identifying and resolving a processing glitch or improving a performance drag, we have experts who can work with you remotely and/or on-site to re-create the problem and then provide an alternative viable approach.
• Mentoring
  It’s easy to learn the basics of installing and using Cincom Smalltalk. But the most productive use is best achieved through customized mentoring for your experience level, developed to meet your needs.
• Migrations
  Cincom Services can move your application suite to the most productive Cincom Smalltalk programming environment, giving you fully scalable, web-based and client-server development enhancements.
• Proof of Concept
  Not sure if Cincom® ObjectStudio® or Cincom® VisualWorks® is the tool you need? An on-site proof of concept that uses your data and meets your business goals will provide that last element of confirmation.

If you have questions, comments or want to discuss creating your own “layaway,” contact the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team.

How Can You Contribute to Cincom Smalltalk Product Direction?

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey discussed how too often people listen with the intent to “reply” rather than to “understand.” Attempting to first be understood, you may miss parts or all of the needs and goals of the person you are listening to.

We often ask you for feedback so our team knows what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong and what we could do better. We are always looking for fresh ways to share information with you.  We want to listen to you so we can understand exactly what you need.

We value your input and want to make sure you know how to get in touch with us:

• Contact the STAR (Strategic Task Action Resource) Team to send us your comments or suggestions.
• Contact Suzanne Fortman for business, support and engineering questions or services opportunities with Cincom Smalltalk.
• Contact Arden Thomas for questions about the Cincom Smalltalk Product Roadmap.
• Contact Jeremy Jordan to share a story regarding how you use Cincom Smalltalk.

BEGINNERS, FREELANCERS and DEVELOPERS

Dedicated to new Smalltalkers, freelancers and seasoned developers, this section gives you informative articles and specific Smalltalk examples for learning new skills or enhancing existing skills using Cincom Smalltalk.

Why Is Productivity with Cincom Smalltalk a Key Factor for JPMorgan?

JPMorgan Chase is a global financial services firm that serves capital markets around the world. With $2.45 trillion in assets and a Dow Jones Industrial Average component, capabilities include investment banking, research, private equities, investment management, private banking, and treasury and security services.

JPMorgan created Kapital, the world’s most advanced financial risk-management and pricing system that supports Interest Rate Hybrids and Credit Hybrids trades, using Cincom Smalltalk. It enables hybrid derivative businesses to easily and simply trade large volumes of highly complex financial instruments.

JPMorgan chose Cincom VisualWorks over other mainstream development languages, including Java. 

“A key factor that has justified using Cincom Smalltalk, above and beyond the technical capabilities that it offers, is the productivity that it has delivered. … We have estimated that if we had built Kapital in another language, such as Java, we would require at least three times the amount of resources to develop and maintain the application.”

JPMorgan met the challenge of finding a development environment that deals with the complexity of its derivative products, delivers unparalleled productivity to stay ahead of the competition, and offers the scalability to support extremely high trading volumes by developing Kapital with Cincom VisualWorks.

• Read more about how Cincom Smalltalk helps JPMorgan be more productive here.

What Is Product Management’s Favorite Hidden Gem?

By Arden Thomas athomas@cincom.com 

How do you make the most productive programming language even more productive? 

It was hard picking a favorite because hidden gems are all based on topics that I think are valuable and useful. After looking them over, my vote for favorite is the DomainMaster framework.   

Why? DomainMaster amplifies the key advantages of Smalltalk—productivity and reuse—and offers: 

• More reuse of well-tested code 
• More reuse of apps 
• Less code to write 
• More understandable code 
• Easier to maintain applications 
• Structure for team or app standards 

What is DomainMaster? 

• A framework that extends the power and concept of ValueModels 
• A provider of APIs for applications much like the API for ValueModels 
• A home for utilities and application standards 

You get an immediate payoff, but the biggest payoff is over time. You have far less code and much easier maintenance, making your return on investment in your system far higher. This is a point I want to emphasize, because the long-term payoff is not obvious in the short term. Done right, the long-term payoff is “Wow!”.  You may find yourself with a large system that is far easier to update and maintain than you would think it has a right to be. 

Want to: 

• Build reusable mini-apps that you can reuse in plug-and-play fashion to make bigger apps?  
• Change a value in a domain model and have changes reflected immediately in all the apps connected to it?  
• Develop some application utility code and use it over and over again in your applications?   

You get the idea. DomainMaster has a big payoff in that it lets you setup, use and change domain objects in a plug-and-play fashion, AND the mini-apps tie into this in a way that makes them highly reusable. Building a new app can be simply selecting and placing these DomainMaster-based mini-apps and writing a minimum of initialization code for how you want it tied together. 

You can also add utility code for things you want to do easily or frequently (or both) and make it simple, clear and easy. Then, all of your apps will have access to this. 

• There are multiple Hidden Gems videos about DomainMaster and how to use it. You can view them on the Hidden Gems DomainMaster playlist here: https://bit.ly/DomainMaster-Playlist.

If you have questions, comments or ideas for other Smalltalk examples or suggestions for future Hidden Gems, please email the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.

Component of the Month: DomainMaster

Last month, we highlighted the TimeProfiler, which is used to profile the time and space usage of a Smalltalk process. The screencast, Hidden Gems: Introduction to the Performance Profiler, shows how to load the TimeProfiler, which can be found in the product.

This month, we are highlighting the DomainMaster, which is featured this month in the Cincom Smalltalk Digest. DomainMaster is a framework that extends the power and concept of ValueModels, provides an API for applications much like the API for ValueModels and is a home for utilities and application standards.

• If you would like more information about DomainMaster, you can view them on the Hidden Gems DomainMaster playlist here: https://bit.ly/DomainMaster-Playlist.
• If you would like the code for DomainMaster, please reach out to Arden Thomas at athomas@cincom.com.

Be a Part of the Cincom Smalltalk 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.