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November 1998 Meeting
Mark will present one of his famous software jam sessions, writing code on the fly at high speed in response to ideas offered by members of the user group. In addition to the software jam session, Mark will also demonstrate the latest Eagle Software developer tools for Delphi. This session is not to be missed! This will be a great session, so we hope to see you all there!! Here's what two well known magazines had to
say about Mark's terrific presentations: From the November 1998 Delphi Informant: "Mark Miller's session on Class Design was spectacular -- insightful, fast paced, humorous, and impressive. Mark is one of the few people with the audacity to perform coding improvisations in front of a large audience." ____________________________________________ The following is an excerpt from an article appearing in the June 1998 issue of Developers Review, a UK publication. This monthly column is call "Snobol": "Here's a Snobol first: unqualified praise. It's for Mark Miller of Eagle Software, who came to speak at the recent Borland Developer Days conference in London. If you should get an opportunity to hear him speak, then I warmly recommend that you go: 'Steal a ticket!' as the theatre critics say (although one can't help but notice that they seem to say it more often on billboards outside theatres than in the reviews that one reads in the paper). Miller was presenting a talk on developing what he called 'Super Forms', ie how to create alternatives to the standard Delphi blank form. The first thing that distinguished this talk and the others at the Borland Developer Days from those given at a run-of-the-mill manufacturer's soft-fest was that they were accompanied by a proper set of printed notes written in real English, as opposed to a Xeroxed printout of a set of bullet-pointed PowerPoint slides which aren't worth spit once you get them home. The second unusual thing was that Miller then told us to ignore them. 'I don't want to do the example in the text, that's boring.You can read it up afterwards. Can someone suggest an interesting form we could do?' 'How about a form that saves its height and width settings to the registry?' said a man in the third row. 'Yeah, great idea!' said Miller, and we were off into an extraordinary software jamming session: Miller typing away like billy-ho, with members of the audience calling out the names of units and corrections ('It's Typinfo! You've spelled it TypeInfo') or suggestions for the design ('Inherit it from a TComponent'), and the speaker letting out his trademark cry of exasperation 'Oh man!' every time a compilation failed or a program didn't work. If you thought that programming was always a personal, selfish pleasure, then you should have seen this: a British audience (correction: a British audience of programmers) shouting out and competing with each other and actually cheering and bursting into spontaneous applause (when Miller, literally racing to delete a buggy DLL before the Delphi IDE loaded it, got there with about half a second to spare) this was uncommon stuff indeed.
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