An interview with Whil Hentzen

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An interview with Whil Hentzen

Gérald Santerre, February 1, 2002

Gérald Santerre, from the Universal Thread, has interviewed Whil Hentzen, from Hentzenwerke Corporation in mid January. We initiated some topics on the company, the Visual FoxPro book publishing and the Great Lakes Great Database Workshop conference. Who is Whil Hentzen? (Looking over shou...

Who is Whil Hentzen?

(Looking over shoulder....) Uh, who wants to know? And that woman in the blue dress and I were just friends. I swear I am not making this up.

OK, the quick bio... four-eyed geek in high school meant teachers pushed me into engineering in college. Met my wife in a drunken stupor (me, not her) at a fraternity party the night after a disastrous track meet; she put up with me anyway and 6 weeks later we knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. Once out of school, built industrial robots for a couple years at a firm that used to be a Fortune 500 company, bought one of those new-fangled "IBM PCs" when they came out in '81, shortly thereafter my wife and I started a PC training and programming company in Cincinnati. Sold that company and moved back to hometown Milwaukee to raise a family in '89. Started developing Fox apps. Ran steadily throughout high school, college and afterwards, logged 43,000 miles until getting badly injured in '95. Underwent surgery in '99 and hoping to get back into the gig. Five kids aged 1 month to 13 years and a bride who's been with me for 24 years.

Would you like to give us an history of Hentzenwerke Corporation?

Kinda sorta did that in previous question... I started custom development in Milwaukee in '90, working out of the house. Moved into an office, hired a bunch of people, lost some people and had family issues that convinced me to spend more time with the kids again, so downsized (ahem) and moved home again.

On your site, there is a mention you have started your company just to be on the top of the organizational chart. How big is this chart today?

As big as it was when I started. <s>

We can understand the "hentzen" part, but what does the "werke" stand for in the name of your company?

I didn't another name like "Hentzen and Associates" - it wasn't very distinctive, and it sounds like an insurance agency. I've always liked company names like "Cameron Iron Works" and "Rouge River Works" - images of huge factories sprawled over hundreds of acres. The German version of "Works" is "Werke" and is popular today - Volkswagenwerke, Bayern Motor Werken, etc. So I stuck the two together - I kind of thought it amusing - Hentzenwerke Corporation generating visuals of huge smokestacks dotting the German countryside when in actuality it was just one computer programmer working in his den.

Why did you start publishing Visual FoxPro books?

Published DevGuide '97 in late '96 and did pretty well, so sat down with the Fox team in '97 at DevCon to talk about books, and collected a bunch of stars to do a set for VFP 6.

In regards to book publishing, which ones are your top sellers?

It's kind of hard to say, since it's not quite fair to compare a book that's been out for four months to one that's been out for four years, and I've never run the numbers on 'average sales per month'. But it's fair to say that the Hacker's Guide has been the number one seller. After that, many of them sell fairly equally.

Would you like to tell us more about ongoing projects for upcoming books?

Nancy Folsom's Debugging Visual FoxPro Applications will be shipping the first week of February, and the Hacker's Guide to VFP 7 is available for ordering (the draft version of the CHM file can be downloaded now). HackFox 7 will ship probably late February - but it will be a normal sized book this time, because we're taking section 4 - the reference section - out and only including it in the CHM file. Other books on the horizon are Cathy Pountney's "The Visual FoxPro Report Writer - Taking it to the Limits and Beyond" will be ready in March, and Akins/Kramek/Schummer's sequel to KiloFox, "MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted to Know About Extending Visual FoxPro", is scheduled for April.

I've got four more in the talking stages as well, and I'm of course open to hearing from new authors with their ideas.

Since you have started into the book publishing, are you pretty much satisfied with the way things work and about the respond of the community to participate in it such as writing, buying and providing feedback? If there would be something to enhance in the way things are right now, what would it be?

I'd say my biggest challenge is still to find authors and editors who have something to say and have the time and dedication to devote part of their life to working on a book. I've had several people who started to work on a book but found the work to be more than they could handle.

I'd also like to find a way to convince people that they shouldn't be afraid to contacting me. I've found that a lot of folks are nervous about working with me - like they're 'in awe of the Great Whil Hentzen' or something. (I'd like them to get in contact with my wife, and maybe they could talk her out of making me take out the garbage and doing the laundry.)

Seriously, I try to be really approachable, and if a prospective author is nervous about contacting me directly, they should talk to one of my current authors, who wil set them straight. <s>

Another aspect of your company is the famous world renown Great Lakes Great Database Workshop. Would you like to describe us why you started to hold those conferences?

Because I didn't know any better. <s> I was at the Mid-Atlantic Database Solutions Workship, led by John Hosier and and run by the user group out there, in 1993, and John and I got to talking the last night in the bar, and it didn't seem like it would be that hard.

Why did you choose "Great Lakes Great Database Workshop" instead of a name which would include "FoxPro" in it?

The Mid-Atlantic Workshop featured tracks on Fox, Visual Basic and Access, and I emulated the design, having tracks for those three plus a fourth on general software development.

The next year I switched to Fox only tracks, but the name stuck - and, let's face it, Fox IS the Great Database, right?

Your conference does not benefit from Microsoft's sponsorship. Why is this?

That's a tricky question to answer - cuz it makes it sounds like Microsoft doesn't support the conference. It's true that we've had our ups and downs in the past - in 1994 our keynote speaker from Microsoft bailed on me 48 hours before the conference, and I had to prepare the keynote - the demo of Visual FoxPro 3.0 - the night before - on disks that were burned before the beta was even released. THAT was.... unnerving. On the other hand, though, Ken became PM just a couple of months before GLGDW '01, though, and pulled together a ton of support - links on the VFP web site, emails, that sort of thing - at the last moment. So I wouldn't say that we don't benefit from their support.

I haven't gotten formal sponsorship, though, in the past, that's true. While it means I don't put the Microsoft logo all over our Web site, it also means that I have complete freedom to choose topics and speakers, and that means a lot to attendees (and speakers.) There have been some very valid criticisms about Microsoft-sponsored conferences (not just VFP - but for many different shows) being thinly-veiled marketing pitches.

GLGDW's focus has always been on teaching developers how to do stuff. I'm a developer - over 15,000 billable hours in the '90's - so I have a pretty good feel for what developers want. Sure, there's a benefit to see some leading edge stuff - to get an idea of where things are going. But at the end of the day, I want my attendees to talk away with things they can use immediately, and I pick my speakers according to whether they will be able to deliver that.

It would be interesting to hear about the first one. When was it and what were the highlights of it?

Wow. That was a long time ago. I'm not sure I was alive back then.

Would you like to tell us more about the recent conference that took place in October such as the number of attendees, the success of the operation including the famous Halloween part of it?

Well, we were pretty lucky - everything came together very nicely.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, I was terribly concerned that we'd get a lot of cancellations, and that would have hurt terribly - I'd already committed for most of the expenses, and I would have lost a huge amount of money. But we only lost a half dozen folks - and two of them simply postponed their registrations till this year.

Registration was still actually down from what I expected based on pre 9/11 registrations, but not all that much. We had about 320 attendees, which made for a really comfortable show.

Halloween was a lot of fun, although I could tell that a lot of people were a little skeptical about coming in costume. Those who did participate, though, really got into it, and provided a lot of fun for the rest of the attendees. And I'm sure that more than a couple of people arrived home with upset stomachs because of the bags of candy on each chair at the closing session <s>.

You have announced another conference for October of this year. What can you say about it so far?

(Acutally, it's November 11-16.) It'll be.... magic.

Do you expect to include another free hour (25 hours/day) this year?

I can neither confirm nor deny whether we have or have not considered, made arrangements for, or otherwise contracted for any product or service that is or is not related to temporal displacement at this or any other time now, in the future, or in the past.

However, I can say that we had so many technical support calls last year from users who didn't read the instructions and then had difficulty with the 25th hour that at this point, it is highly unlikely that we will offer the 25th hour again this year.

People that have been attending conferences for years speak highly of GLGDW. Some Visual FoxPro veterans attend only your event. Is there anything you would like to comment on in regards to this?

I guess what I was saying in the question about Microsoft sponsorship above - where I referred to "my attendees" and "my speakes". I know most of the attendees personally, and, of course, I know all of my speakers well - some of them have been close friends for a decade. And it's "my conference" - and so since GLGDW is the only one I do, I can put more care into it than if I was doing a bunch of cookie cutter events, and that obviously shows.

Since a few years, your company is publishing a lot of Visual FoxPro books. Are you still doing some consulting work? If yes, would you like to describe us what types of services your company is offering in regards to that?

2001 was the first year since 1989 that I billed less than 1500 hours, and, frankly, I needed the break. It was nice having a year where I didn't have customers calling every day wondering where their application was...

I'm probably going to sit out 2002 for the most part, maybe billing 500-750 hours on a couple of projects, and doing a couple of pro-bono gigs.

Over the years, the projects I've worked on have gotten bigger and bigger, to the point that I won't look at anything under 500 hours - I'd much rather do one big project of 1,000 hours than ten 100 hour projects. As far as services, just custom software applications for businesses, like I have for the last decade. I don't do other types of consulting - just writing code and shipping it!

As a company which is involved at various aspects of the Visual FoxPro product, what is your view about the Visual FoxPro product in general?

I've been using Fox for about 12 years now, and I still get a thrill each time I load it - it's such a versatile tool - I can do ANYTHING with it!

You have won the award for Best Conference in the Universal Thread Visual FoxPro Members Choice Award 2001. What do you think makes your conference unique and why people like it so much?

The purpose of the conference is to have a great show, not to make a lot of money. I price it to break even, figuring that the exposure that the conference brings is good marketing for my consulting and book publishing businesses. That mindset carries over to the speakers and the attendees - everyone is there to learn some good stuff and have some fun - and we're all chipping in to defray the costs.

That mindset - of everyone - has a huge impact on everyone. We all care first and foremost about putting on a great show, a great experience for everyone involved. I've found that by and large, my speakers really give GLGDW their best effort of the year.

The small size also has a big effect - attendees and speakers and vendors all mix easily throughout the conference, and I've set up everything to further those goals. I don't have to worry about cutting costs or scrimping on aspects of the conference because they'd eat into a pre-determined target for corporate profit margins. If we have a higher than expected attendance, then I've got extra funds that I can plow back into the conference.

As anyone who has attended GLGDW in the past, it's truly a family affair, and has that 'small-town, Andy of Mayberry' feel to it. My 13 year old daughter helps out with registration and at the evening sessions, and my wife and other kids help assemble goodies in our living room the weeks before the conference. It's an opportunity for them to really see "what Dad does", and to learn that you should be able to have fun making a living.

Finally, we all have a lot of fun. Life's too short to take things too seriously. That's why I try to include some fun, like the 25th hour, the costume contest, the "Where the hell is that" mixer, Jeopardy, and other things.

You find a bottle in the desert, open it and a jinni grant you only one wish. What is this wish?

You mean besides having Heather Locklear move in next door and offer to mow my lawn in a bikini each week? OK, seriously, my wish would be for each of my kids to grow up healthy and have a good, safe life, and for my wife and I to grow old - well, older - enjoying the experience of watching our kids grow up, and to die in our sleep after a long, healthy life.

Many, many thanks for this cool interview.

I (and the UT gang) wish you a very happy year 2002! :-)

Gérald Santerre, Gerald Santerre enrg.
Gérald Santerre joined the Universal Thread team in November 2001. After the completion of his programming course, he began working for a small shop with FoxPro Windows. A couple of months later, Microsoft launched Visual FoxPro 3 and he started his journey in the world of OOP. He worked for the National Bank of Canada Intranet doing Web programming with VFP. Since January 2001, he became self employed and he has designed some applications for the Nortel Network's, Bombardier's Intranet site and for other customers as well. He is always open to new contract opportunities, so feel free to contact him!