What Is the Hidden Gems Screencast Series and Why Is It Valuable?

The Hidden Gems screencast series is well known to long-time readers of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest. Those who are new to Smalltalk or Cincom Smalltalk may be unaware of what this series is or how it can benefit their developer path. Let’s look more closely at what these instructional tutorial videos are all about.

Arden Thomas created the Hidden Gems screencast series to share shortcuts, tips and techniques that may help others learn or get started with Cincom Smalltalk. Arden shares how he uses various Cincom Smalltalk components, as well as features that he considers “hidden gems” for his own productivity, in these screencasts.

You can hear more details directly from Arden in this Introduction to Hidden Gems.

Additionally, Suzanne Fortman shares her thoughts on the impact of these videos in “What Are the Benefits of Hidden Gems?”

This screencast series is a growing collection of valuable nuggets compiled by Arden over the course of several years. At the time of writing, the list has surpassed 80 items, with more in the works for 2023 (see below for the most recent!). To make viewing the series easier, we’ve divided it into the following manageable and understandable subcategories:

• Tools Series – The Tools Series explores some tools and product features that developers should find useful. 
• Techniques Series – The Technique Series shows various techniques of how to accomplish or solve different tasks from automating image build to creating a custom parser. 
• ValueModel Series – The ValueModel Series shows the principles, capabilities and use of the powerful ValueModel framework.
• DomainMaster Series – The DomainMaster Series introduces an application framework that leverages the principles of the ValueModel to make application development easier, faster, capable and reliable.  
• Persistence Series – The Persistence Series shows multiple techniques of how to save and load objects to disk, where using a full database might be overkill or unwieldy.
• Collections Series – The Collections Series shows some lesser-known collections that may be beneficial for your collections toolbox.