Join us on November 18th for Dan Antion’s experience report on their return to Smalltalk.

Bio:

Daniel Antion is Vice President, Information Services at American Nuclear Insurers. He is responsible for the overall planning and implementation of technology and communication services for ANI and is part of a team addressing Enterprise Content Management. Dan is also responsible for technical and ECM training. ANI is a small but technically oriented company so Dan’s view is both from 30,000 feet and from in the trenches.
Dan has been working in Smalltalk since 1994 and develops most of ANI’s transaction processing systems. Dan has presented at Smalltalk Solutions, OOPSLA and the AIIM Expo on topics related to systems development, content management and SharePoint.

Talking Points:

1) Why we were driven away from Smalltalk – I think our environment is not unlike many shops in that we have good, solid but aging systems lacking hooks into modern technology

2) The analysis round #1 – In our first study, Smalltalk (and our other existing platform) lost big time to C#.

3) Turning Points – There were several bits of information that came to the surface as we started to make our move that made us want to reconsider our decision. These are the things that I think would be most useful for others in a similar situation.

4) Analysis round #2 – This was harder. We had already announced our plans and now we had to argue against our previous decision but still look like we knew what we were talking about.

5) Revised Direction – I’m not sure we saved Smalltalk forever but we bought it some serious time. The technical details that work for Smalltalk include its stability, malleability and extensibility. We still have concerns but we think they can be mitigated.