4 days / 20 talks
Awesome and great speakers
Alex Clay
A second-generation Omnis developer, Alex started coding with Omnis Studio in 2000 and ported Suran’s existing Omnis 7-based software to Omnis Studio. In 2006 Alex was promoted to Software Development Manager and began expanding Suran’s development team, including hiring and training numerous recent graduates on Omnis development.
In 2009 Alex introduced Agile software management and test-driven development to Suran. He developed the OmnisTAP unit-testing framework for Omnis Studio and lead Suran’s development team through a transformation into the world of sprints, test harnesses, continuous integration, and clean code.
In 2019 Alex was appointed CEO of Suran Systems. While the day-to-day development of Suran is handled by the development team, Alex remains connected to Suran’s products through decades of product knowledge and client experience. Alex’s current focus for Suran is growth through consolidating and improving products and services, and expanding into new partnerships and business opportunities.
Alex is a member of computer science advisory council at Eastern Kentucky University. He holds a degree in Business Management from the University of Kentucky. Alex was a presenter at the OpenBase 2005 conference, EurOmnis 2017, 2018, and 2023, and teaches at Suran’s annual user training conference, now in its 24th season.
Beyond Omnis Studio, Alex has developed native iOS apps in Objective-C, extensive back-end logic using PostgreSQL’s stored procedures, web applications using Ruby on Rails, and automation using SaltStack, bash, and numerous other languages and tools.
Alex lives in Lexington, KY, with his wife and 12 year-old daughter. He enjoys the culinary arts, role-playing TTRPGs, and sings semi-professionally at the Episcopal Cathedral in Lexington. He has been fortunate to tour abroad numerous times with his choir and during personal vacations, and his favorite trip abroad was a 17-day visit to Iceland in Summer 2022.
Session 1: Extending PostgreSQL
Postgres is the database engine of choice for many omnis developers. However, it can be more that just a database. Alex will demonstrate a number of techniques or options to take advantage of Postgres that you may be aware that you have at your fingertips.
For example, Foreign Data Wrappers allow postgres to talk to most other SQL databases, noSQL DB’s, files, LDAP, Excel, web sites via HTTP, Big Data and more. With that cross database connectivity, you could query your customer database, your bug tracking system, receivables and develop some marketing metrics such as who has not using the system recently and either hasn’t paid their annual invoice, or who has not submitted a suport request. That kind of knowledge might generate a callout to do a health check on the customer relationship. It is possible to create a query in postgres that joins data from a number of database/files that do not use postgres.
Or, what about doing bulk data loading to your postgres database very quickly, checking data as you go, with the advantage that users can be in the system 24×7?
Alex’s session will show a number of these ‘less than obvious uses of postgres’ that have saved his team immeasurable time.
Session 2: Software Testing Clinic
Alex has done well received sessions on Software testing at past Euromnis Conferences. Instead of discussing test protocols and what they look like, the clinic will help each session participant actually build some tests for their own software with Alex’s help.
If you believe in the notion of adding tests, this clinic will ensure you leave with some tests you can run and some techniques for refactoring code to make it easier to add more tests.
Once you have some tests that work on your own code, the process of adding tests to future code will be easier.