2013 has gotten off to a great start. This month, we are thrilled to welcome Oliver Sturm back to the DevExpress team. This month, I sat down with him to learn more about what he’s been up to while he was away, what he’ll be doing at DevExpress, and superpowers.
SF: Welcome back, Oliver. We are so happy you rejoined the team. Tell us a little about what you’ve been up to the past few years and what will you be doing in your new role at DevExpress?
OS: When I left DevExpress about three years ago, I started spending most of my time working on consulting projects. While I had a large number of general software architecture projects, I had a consistent number of customers who were focused primarily on building applications with the DevExpress toolset. As often happens with consulting, many of my clients began to look for mentoring as well. As a result, I started building out instructor-led training around the DevExpress toolset and scheduling public and private classroom training events in Europe and the US several times a year. In late 2012 I released an online course on the DevExpress ASP.NET WebForms component suite.
It was around that time I realized the how much I really enjoy the DevExpress tools. I was using them long before I joined DevExpress the first time and I never stopped using them, or telling people about them. The time was just right now to come back and put some fresh effort into the training program! In my new role I will build a comprehensive portfolio of training content to be delivered in online as well as classroom courses.
SF: That’s exciting for us and for our customers, no doubt. What is it you love about training?
OS:What makes a training class a great experience for me is the feeling that I'm telling the students something they didn't know yet. In technology, any topic can be exciting to somebody who wasn't familiar with it so far and who is just learning how that new thing is going to make their life easier in the future. Whatever the topic is, it is my job during class preparation to structure the content in such a way that there is a clear path from beginning to end. I'll identify what's particularly great about the topic, and the path will lead past all those points in the right order. That's what learning is all about: being told things you didn't know yet but you need to know, in the correct order. At the end of a particular class I've taught, that one is usually my favorite one - until the next one starts!
SF: It sounds very gratifying (and fun). Along the lines of mentoring and training, if a WinForms or ASP.NET developer were to ask you what he/she should be learning today to ensure he/she has relevant skills for the future, what would you tell them?
OS: First, and most importantly, learn HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript and some of the related tool stack, like jQuery, Knockout, LESS or Sass - everything platform independent programming requires today. The reality is that mainstream programming today requires very few actual client applications and the technologies I've mentioned lend themselves more and more to the kind of client programming that is still important. If you truly need to create client applications that interact with hardware or integrate with the operating system beyond what's possible with the platform independent stack, everything depends on your platform of choice - on Windows, you should look closely at WinRT and possibly brush up on your XAML skills, because that new platform is very likely to stay around.
SF: That’s sound advice. What technology trends interest *you* the most today?
OS: I am most excited about the openness we are seeing in software development. The traditional boundaries of hardware platforms and operating systems are no longer so important today. It's great to see how technologies around HTML, CSS and JavaScript grow more and more powerful, but at the same time gain a degree of acceptance all around the industry that is unprecedented.
SF: I tend to agree. I think we are at an exciting inflection point in our industry.
So from the present to the past - rumor has it you wrote your first application in Turbo Pascal for DOS. Tell us a little about the application.
OS: Well, that was probably the first application I wrote that actually did something useful. It was a management system for a doctor's practice, custom made for a friend's wife. I wrote the whole thing from scratch: data storage, the user interface - which involved some fancy data entry forms including validation - and printer drivers for dot matrix printers to output the correct forms for medical supplies orders. The last time I heard about it was actually in this millennium, but I believe the system is no longer in use by now.
SF: Cool! If you were to rewrite it today, what would you do differently? What would it look like?
OS: The problem I was solving back then is certainly still current today, but I'm sure many details have changed. I would probably want to write such an application as a multi-tenant enabled web application so I could offer it as an installation-free service. If there was the necessity of having an actual client component - perhaps to interface with some special hardware locally - I would mainly target Windows, but try to keep the client specific components to a minimum so I could offer support for other or new platforms quite easily. I would certainly want to deploy to the cloud - ASP.NET MVC 4 on Azure is a very strong platform now, but the same project could be done with .NET or Java on Amazon AWS, or with Java or Python on Google AppEngine. Isn't it fantastic how the requirements don't dictate a target platform anymore?
SF:LOL! Yes. No doubt. OK – so on to the not-so-serious stuff…if you had a super power, what would it be?
OS:What do you mean,"if"? You haven't noticed? <g>
I think I'd like the ability to communicate with anybody about anything. There are languages of course, and then there are different backgrounds, experiences, cultures... most everything that goes wrong in this world seems to be because somebody failed to get their point across at the right time, in the right words, using the right tone etc. Plus of course, it would guarantee immediate guru status as a trainer!
Failing that, how about being able to guess lottery numbers?
SF:Those are brilliant. If you gain the ability to guess the lottery numbers, hope you’ll share that intel with your co-workers <g>.
Finally, can you tell us one thing most people do not know about you?
OS: If you look at me from just the wrong angle in an unfortunate light, it looks like some of the hair on my head is turning grey.
SF: LOL! That’s great! Thanks for your time, Oliver. And again, welcome back!