Tuesday March 07, 2006

Singapore Sun Tech Days Trip Report

Hello Vijay, Kuldip and all,

Here are some notes from my trip to Singapore to speak about Studio 11 
at the Sun Tech Days.

Conference Organization

Singapore was a very good place for Sun Tech Days - the attendance was 
high, and the attenders were generally very much interested in Sun 
technologies.  They listened well and asked interesting questions.

Security was organized quite well - each attender had his/her badge 
scanned before entering the room where presentation took place.

Many people from other departments of Sun (Deepak Jeevan Kumar and 
Kian-Chau Ng from Educational Sales, Ed Pilatowicz from Solaris Kernel) 
were interested in what we do and how we do it, and also in specifics of 
Sun Studio.  I eagerly told them, and we agreed they'll contact us with 
compiler questions.

Studio 11 talk

Once again it was confirmed that the developers awareness of our product 
is in serious need of improvement.  Thus the audience, in my opinion, 
has been divided into two parts - people who used Forte/Studio products 
before, and people who didn't have an idea about what's going on.  In my 
speech I tried to address both parties.  The message for the second 
party was that the Studio is very cool, and if you develop for Solaris 
or Linux, you should use Studio.  At the same time, I listed and 
advertised cool new features for the developers who are already our 
customers to get them into using the latest Studio, and also to urge 
them to express their concerns about Studio usage.

Note for novice speakers in a foreign language: speaking in short 
sentences really helps to get the point across.  As do eye contact, open 
gestures and well-placed jokes.

I've had 45 slides and 45 minutes for sides and Q&A.  Instead of reading 
the slides, I've prepared message for each slide and delivered them, 
sometimes in details, so it wouldn't overlap with the slide text.  I 
think it worked well enough - I said almost all I was planning to say, 
and managed to complete the talk in 38 minutes.

Alot of questions were asked some time after the speech.  I've roamed 
the conference facilities, using t-shirt with Sun logo and an inviting 
smile to urge the attenders to ask questions, and it worked!

Main points of concern:

Cross-compilation issue was brought up again.  Customers want to develop 
on x86/x64 for all around efficiency and to compile for SPARC for 
stability.  I've been asked the same during the other customer visits.  
I think we should seriously consider this direction.

Customers want even more integration with Java development tools.  
Basically, they want Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Studio in one to be 
able to develop mixed code application without having to install two 
products.  Sounds reasonable enough to me, and in the spirit of getting 
JED products together.

There is alot of confusion about product naming.  When people hear "Sun 
Studio", they often think of Java first.  Nobody thinks of compilers, 
dbx, or analyzer for this matter.  Of course, Tech days help to unravel 
this misunderstanding a great deal.

One of the concerns expressed was by a customer whose program dumped 
core after a few days of work.  I offered him possible approaches to the 
problem - try to debug the core file and to examine his program for 
memory leaks using run-time checking feature of dbx.  Ed Pilatowicz 
chimed in and offered to preload a library to track memory access (just 
for the future reference - which of the ways is preferred?)

All in all, it was a very educating experience.  The only thing I missed 
was pepper crab 

Thanks for reading that far!

Boris Ivanovsky