Probably Will Be Around The Forums For Help More Often

JoseKreif

Member
I'm just gonna use this as a introduction thread.

I am a 23 yr old male. I graduated with an Associates Degree for programming and ended up getting a career immediately following.

This is kind of a long and sad story. So you can just skip to TL-DR

I recently started a new job as a Progress programmer. The language scared me a bit and do to the lack of readily available information, I always thought I was in a dead end, the wrong job.

That was until I met my coworker who was twice my age and has been working in Progress as a career his whole life. He was amazingly skilled in it. He ended up mentoring me in the language and helped me complete projects showing me the best and efficient ways to use the language. He showed me the value of indexes and how they can determine the how long a program takes to run. I took the lesson to to heart, to point where while maintaining an old program, I noticed the index was wrong and changed it. The program went from taking 20 minutes to create a report, to just about 3 seconds.

I always had him available the instant I ran into something I didn't understand in Progress, or needed his insight on completing a specific goal. I've begun to love progress more than the other languages. I no longer have that feeling inside me that I had when I first was hired.

He was a mentor to me. Aside from progress, he would show me some scripts he wrote with shell to automate a lot of tedious tasks on our Linux server. We became good friends and began to socialize outside of work, such as fishing or gaming, or even just chitchat every now and then. He really loved programming, and enjoyed getting to share his knowledge with me. He told me in all his years with the company, he had spent more time talking to me than anyone else in the department.

Unfortunately, he got really sick and passed away after being in a ICU for a dew days. I only got to work with him for literally just 5-6 months. I have so much more to learn from him. Even today I'm maintaining code and I see something I hadn't seen before, he is no longer there for me to ask him about it.

I owe my job and success so far to him. There is no way I could of learned what I know in progress on my own.

I will try to reach out for help from the few other coworkers I have yet. But, I'll probably be here with a couple questions a week depending on how many questions I can't seem to get a good answer to.

I'm not an advanced programmer, and our company doesn't really use progress to the full potential (as my mentor would tell me). We use 10.2B on Linux, so to some, it's simple. So my questions may be super easy to answer time-to-time.


TL-DR

Unfortunately, my good friend and Progress mentor passed away. So I will be looking for guidance elsewhere.
 
Last edited:

Cringer

ProgressTalk.com Moderator
Staff member
Welcome aboard Jose. So sorry to hear about your mentor.
The Progress community is unbelievably open and welcoming. Yes you'll have to put up with some folks telling you that you'll need to get your version upgraded soon, but take all that with a pinch of salt. (You should certainly have a plan for that though!) Ultimately we've all been in a very similar boat, and all have very similar experiences with the Progress learning curve. As a result we tend to be very open with what we know. And in fact there's a lot of information readily available for Progress. It just doesn't help that searching for Progress as a keyword leads you to a lot of dead ends! (OpenEdge works a bit better).
If you haven't already, then sign up for the official Progress Community: Progress Community A lot of very experienced folk post there and not here.
Also make sure you bookmark the documentation for your current version, or even download it.
Good luck and ask away!
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
A few good web resources:

Documentation: OpenEdge Product Documentation Overview - Wiki - OpenEdge General - Progress Community
Public Knowledge Base: Progress KB - Home
ProKB (Windows-based offline Knowledge Base app): http://download.progress.com/open/products/prokb/ProKBsetup.exe
OpenEdge Product Availability and Lifecycle Guides: OpenEdge Product Availability Guides and Lifecycle Guide - Wiki - OpenEdge General - Progress Community
OpenEdge product enhancement submissions: https://community.progress.com/community_groups/products_enhancements
Progress User Groups (PUGs): https://community.progress.com/progress_user_groups
OpenEdge Hive: http://www.oehive.org
ProTop, the free open-source OpenEdge database monitor: ProTop Version 3

Annual Progress technical conferences:
PUG Challenge/Exchange Americas: www.pugchallenge.org
PUG Challenge EMEA: http://pugchallenge.eu

If you want to accelerate your growth in OpenEdge, there is no better way than to attend a technical conference. There are dozens of sessions from Progress Software and industry experts across a wide range of subjects and skill levels. You can network with your peers and talk directly to Progress Software engineers, architects, and product and account managers. I highly recommend it. Also, slide decks (and sometimes recordings) are available for download from past conferences and are a great learning resource:
Progress Community
PUG Challenge Americas
EMEA PUG Challenge 2015| Home
 
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