Rainer Becker
It's conference time again. This year's Prague DevCon took place, SouthWestFox and the FoxPro DevCon Germany and other events are coming soon. And lots of new topics and new stuff to learn for everyone. For 15+ years I have really tried to attend conferences and learn new things. And the FoxPro conferences I always enjoyed most as they are the best on earth from my perspective. I am really sorry about each one I missed for whatever reason. Surely the FoxPro DevCons are smaller nowadays, which is a pity as the number of topics you need to know about has increased each year. Therefore developers have to attend other conferences as well.
To be honest, I am really disappointed by a lot of resumes when we search for FoxPro developers to hire. Maybe they attended a conference or two, but they have neither MCP/MVP degrees to show nor any community activity to exchange ideas. What about Client/Server and all the nice tools that come with SQL Server for analysis and reporting? Object Oriented Design, COM servers, web apps and real XML still are a problem in a lot of cases. Then, not much experience with frameworks or tools, always inventing everything anew. Understanding customer requirements, teamwork, creative solutions - these count among the musthaves as well. And yes, typing fast really helps.
The list seems endless, and if you can work and learn in all of these topics in your current job you are lucky indeed. But even then acquiring additional knowlegde really helps. If you are used to attending just one conference a year, make it two. If you do not attend conferences at all, make it two as well. There is so much more than ever to learn, and as a FoxPro developer facing a shift sooner or later, your learning curve will steepen anyhow - better startincreasing your speed of adopting new things right now. We hope that our magazine will help!