Peter:
Welcome to the first episode of this Unicast podcast, the first real podcast about Uniface. I have announced this podcast for a long time. And finally, it’s here! That is not the only good news. Even better is that I am not going to do this all by myself. This is not a one man show. Allow me to introduce my co-host: Henk van der Veer.
Henk, welcome to our podcast.
Henk:
Yes, it’s good to be here. Very exciting to do this. I wonder how and what we can contribute to the worldwide Uniface society.
Peter:
Yeah, Let’s talk about that challenge during this episode, Henk. But first I want to thank you for something.
Henk:
Oh?
Peter:
Yes, first of all thanks for doing this together with me and being a respectful colleague and a good friend.
You broke my procastination to start this podcast. I was in a vicious circle about the name of the podcast. Of course, that’s something very small and not very important, but still big enough that I didn’t have to start. You weren’t aware of it, but nevertheless thank you so much for that.
Henk:
I was happy to hear you like the name. I like to play with words, always looking for a twist. Something like Uniface podcast sounds ultimately boring, the mix of both words sounded funny to me. I must say, I doubted the name a bit, since the word unicast has a meaning by itself: In computer networking, unicast is a one-to-one transmission from one point in the network to another point; that is, one sender and one receiver. Well, hopefully that does not apply to this podcast, I’m hoping for multicast. But then again, it’s with a twist.
I’m looking forward to talk about Uniface and the Uniface world, Peter.. But maybe we should introduce ourselves here first?
Peter:
I think so. This is a good opportunity, isn’t it. Shall I start? My name is Peter Lammersma. My accent will give away that I am Dutch. I live small village near Amsterdam. My Uniface journey started in 1996 with version 5, but after only a few months I switched to version 6. Since then, I have seen all versions of Uniface and worked on dozens of projects in The Netherland and abroad. Besides being a Uniface developer, I am an entrepreneur. In early 2000, I founded Unividuals. A collaboration of experienced Uniface professionals.
That’s it in a nutshell. What about you? What is your story?
Henk:
Sorry to say I’m a bit older than you are and started working for Uniface in their headquarters in Amsterdam in February of 1989; the company was still called Inside Automation, customers were using version 3.3 and version 4 was still being tested. In those days there were two Uniface entities: there was Uniface BV and there was Uniface Netherlands, which was the sales and first line support organization for the Dutch customers. I started as support consultant with Uniface BV, initially in the role of 2nd line support, i.e. supporting the 1st line support for Uniface Netherland as well as the distributors worldwide, analyzing customer problems, trying to help them out without the need for a software change, but also creating reproduction cases for the software engineers, testing their fixes etc. Uniface was a vast expanding organization in those days and since my start I’ve held several roles in the organization, including several years as customer support manager in the USA at their headquarters in California, Test manager, Development manager, Project and Program manager. etc. I have been part of the development of all Uniface versions since then, including Uniface 10. Late in 2018, following a pretty big reorganization, I became a self-employed and independent Uniface consultant and was very happy to join UnividualS.
And on a personal level, I live in a very small village, way smaller than were you live, quite rural actually, but still close to Amsterdam. My wife and I have two adult children, a daughter and a son, both live in Amsterdam.
Peter:
I am always impressed with your Uniface work experience. Literally quite a journey.
Talking about journey. I like to think of my life, at least the working part of it, as a journey. Uniface has been part of this journey for a long time. And I am far from being done with Uniface, there is so much to explore. And on this journey, I meet all kinds of people. Most are just passers-by, but some, some turn out to be inspiring travelling companions. The professionals at Unividuals are among those. Who have thus become part of my journey and I, hopefully, a travel companion for them.
That was also one of the triggers for this podcast. I am not the only one on this kind of Uniface journey. I’m sure there are lots of potential travel companions out there. Since you are listening to this podcast, you might be one of them. Hopefully, this podcast will be a guide for you in your Uniface journey.
Sorry for this long introduction.
What on earth are we going to do with this podcast?
Henk:
We could do something like telling what we have noticed recently in a Uniface project?
After all these years, you expect to have seen everything and then something catches your eye that you didn’t expect.
Peter:
I once had a project manager tell me after I presented him with a problem. He said: “You have given yourself an exciting task.”
Are there things that still stand out to you? I don’t think so. If so, I’m sure you can give an example.
Henk:
Well, diving into a technical issues is tempting, but both an opportunity and a risk for this podcast – let’s agree that this podcast is not primarily intended as a training platform for the latest features. Although we will not shy away from that either.
We may consider ourselves as quite experienced, but there are a lot of very smart and experienced Uniface developers out there as well. Then again, everybody has built their own expertise over the years and nobody knows everything there is to know about Uniface.
So, we may run the risk that our potential listeners react like ‘Been there, Done that, not of interest to me’. On the other hand, it may be nice to recognize that you’re not the only one who has dealt or is still dealing with certain problems.
Okay, let’s address my own blatant lack of knowledge – until recently that is: the debugger. And remember: I learned debugging Uniface in version 4: no graphical help, you stepped though the code line by line by keying ‘s’ or ‘e’ followed by the name of a field or a dollar register, i.e. $1 to $99 (this was before named global, local or component variables were introduced).
Peter: I remember that from Uniface Six….
If you knew the code well you could take larger steps, say s10 or s100, but no support for breakpoints or whatsoever. So, until recently I used the graphical debugger in a similar way, well a bit more advanced of course, but merely using breakpoints that I defined manually while running the debugger, etc., not using conditional breakpoints or more advanced use. It was you who pointed me to all sorts of very helpful functions that I wished I had known years ago.
Peter: Did I?? 😉
Not too long ago I had the problem that I needed to find out what certain code looked like in a deployed production environment. The actual problem was that this code was not present anymore in the development environment. The form ran fine in the production environment, but in the development environment it could not be compiled anymore due to a coding error. So, something had been changed, but what? Older versions in the version control system did not give a clue either, so how to find out what the production code looked like.
When I mentioned this to you, you came to the rescue and said “Aren’t you familiar with the “Browser” functionality of the debugger? That enables you to look at every module of every component in the deployed environment (under the condition that the application wasn’t compiled with no debug, of course). Way to go, it helped me solve the problem within minutes! I can’t thank you enough for that!
Peter:
Haha, I remember that. I was surprised that you didn’t know that. And honored that I knew something you didn’t.
Henk:
Is there something that has drawn your attention lately?
Peter:
During your story, I was thinking about something I noticed during an online session with a customer. In this, the customer wanted to go through a certain global proc with the debugger. He knew that the global proc was called somewhere in a component. With some surprise, I watched him, sharing his screen in an online meeting, step through all the code until he would stumble upon the global proc somewhere. He had no idea that in the Uniface debugger you can not only open a list of components and set a breakpoint there, but you can do the same for global procs. So you want to debug a particular global proc? Then browse in the debugger to the relevant global proc and set a break point there. The debugger will then automatically stop when that break point is reached.
That is the same browser function in the debugger you mentioned.
Henk:
Yes, speaking for myself: I’m always curious to find out new ways, new stuff, but at the same time it’s so easy to stick to what you know already. Just a small push from a colleague can be so helpful!
Is it an idea to pick a theme every now and then where we can go a little deeper into an aspect of Uniface? It really could be anything.
Peter:
That seems like a good idea. Perhaps we could also give our listener the opportunity to ask questions?
Henk:
Listeners you mean, plural. You’d put it in singular.
Peter:
Ha ha, that was intentional. I am already happy with one listener!
Henk:
So, it’s unicast after all! (haha)
Peter:
I do have another idea for this podcast. Why don’t we give our audience a voice? I mean, we can invite interesting travel companions, to stay in the metaphor used earlier, to tell their stories. I can name a list of people who were or still are important in the Uniface world. So can you.
Henk:
Yes, absolutely! We can invite them as a guest in this show. Who shall we invite?
Peter:
Let’s first make that list and then we can invite someone. I do have a kind of ultimate goal. Do you know who I definitely want to have in the show?
Henk:
Is it someone that is important at the moment? Deniz Yugnuk? Mike Taylor?
Peter:
Them I definitely want, but I mean Bodo! One of the founders of Uniface. I remember drinking a glass of Chablis with him in a club in Amsterdam, nine years ago. Do you think we can invite him?
Henk:
I haven’t met him for a long time either, but there’s only one way to find out – let’s see whether we can track him down in our networks and ask whether he’s up for it.
But it sounds like a plan: we answer Uniface questions from our audience and we invite interesting guests.
Peter:
Before we end this first episode, I want to mention something important.
Henk:
Yes… what do you mean?
Peter:
This year it’s Uniface 40th anniversary. That’s an opportunity to meet all interesting players in the Uniface world!
Henk:
Yes, let’s hope to see many familiar and unfamiliar faces.
Peter:
Travel companions. I find that gives me a warm feeling. That we are not alone in this Uniface world. Seems nice to meet or get to know them again.
I feel that brings us to the end of the podcast a bit. What do you think?
Henk:
Yes, I agree. Both of those travelling companions and that ending.
What will we do next time?
Peter:
Let’s make a beginning of that list with guests we would like to invite. Maybe we have a guest in the next episode already?
For now, thanks for doing this together with me, Henk.
And thanks to our audience. If you have any questions for Henk or myself. Or if you have an idea for this podcast, please feel free to contact us. You can find the contact details on our website: unividuals.com.
