Peter Coffee - Keynote Address

by Sue Alchesay

Published 1997-09-01    Printer-friendly version

Peter was introduced by our own illustrious Bruce Barrington. Peter's list of credentials are impressive: He evaluates programming tools and engineering/scientific software, and has a weekly column "PC At Work" in PC Week Magazine. He also writes technical articles on wireless communication technology, data security, and advanced microprocessor design, and has written a book on Java and co-authored one on JavaBeans. His degrees include a Bachelors in Civil Engineering from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine. He also does volunteer science teaching in elementary and middle school, and has taught college classes in data processing, management science and artificial intelligence.

Peter is a very good speaker; and his presentation was very polished. However, I had trouble finding an overall theme that I could wrap my hands around and grasp. His presentations was titled "No Excuses", but I didn't see that title being relevant to a lot that he talked about. After some reflection; I decided his presentation could better be titled, "The Rapid Pace of Technology, How it affects Developers and Users, some comments on Java and JavaBeans, and my recommendations for you, the developer, for now and in the Future." Unfortunately, he was rather thin on the recommendations end of things - but he brought up a lot of interesting problems.

With such a wide-open topic; you can cover a lot of ground; and that's exactly what Peter did. His PowerPoint slides were made up of various and sundry quotes from various people. These quotes tied into what he was speaking about, but didn't do much to highlight his topics. This approach obviously gives the experienced speaker plenty of room to tailor his presentation to the time requirements and the audience; which is pretty much what Peter did. Overall, I would say his presentation was an interesting collection of sound bites.

Peter commented on the rapid pace of technology, saying it makes life tough for the user and the programmer. He said he has this fantasy of standing in front of ComDex with a bullhorn saying, "What are you people doing here? The stuff that's on your desks right now is what you thought was total fantasy five years ago... why haven't you solved all your problems by now? Answer: the definition of the problem keeps changing."

Talking about developing software, Peter said; "Why is this still so hard? How come developing applications still presents such a challenge to really smart people equipped with really phenomonal resources? Because only by figuring out what it is that makes it so difficult can we begin to figure out what to demand of our technology partners, like TopSpeed; and where to invest our efforts in our own continuing education and professional development." Unfortunately; Peter did not offer any ideas on how to do that.

Peter encouraged us to focus on our users' needs: "What is it that we're trying to be in control of with an application? Do we have a good model of what the user need is, what the available resources are, and how best to find a connection between those two things. That's really the challenge that's in front of us now. Just getting the code to compile - I'm sorry, that's what one of my instructors used to call an MROTJ: minimum requirement of the job. It's no longer an impressive skill."

....."Meanwhile, we still have increasing volatility of requirements, it's now almost axiomatic that by the time you get the system into alpha, the problem has significantly changed; by the time the product's into beta, the problem has substantially changed; by the time the product is ready to ship, the problem no longer exists in its originally envisioned form. Your definition of success changes under these conditions."

Peter spoke a bit about Java, pointing out that, despite promises to the contrary, using Java is a case of "write once, debug everywhere". He talked about the development cycle of the language Java and the platform JavaBeans, and how that development process affected various major corporations.

The last theme Peter covered was radio transmitted data and encryption. He pointed out that the more wireless devices we use, the more open we are to unauthorized use of the radio-transmitted information - including conversations on the portable radios we commonly call "cellular phones".

This led into the subject of encryption, about which Peter was passionate. In a nutshell, encrypt everything you consider important, and don't forget to check the security of the transcription key, too.

Overall, I felt that Peter talked a lot about general problems, but didn't offer many recognizeable solutions. Bernard Grosperrin, our Team TopSpeed Internet Team Leader, had another impression ; he felt that Peter's presentation was a lot like trying to look at the sun by seeing it's reflection on the moon... as Peter presented all these problems facing developers today, Bernard sensed that the underlying theme was that we, as Clarion developers, have the solution to these problems in the unique and wonderful tool that is Clarion for Windows.

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942