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Eric Hill celebrates 30 years at SAS!

Hill_Eric_2016.jpg-original.jpg Eric Hill is celebrating 30 years at SAS this month. Eric started at SAS on June 1, 1994, and was hired into Mark Cates’ PC SAS group.

According to Jennifer Clegg, Eric’s early career at SAS involved working on the SAS Display Manager for Windows where he made significant contributions including incorporating the Enhanced Editor. His next major project was working on the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office where he played a major role in getting this product to market.

Eric joined JMP in 2006 to work on the integration with SAS. Eric and John Schroedl worked on a comprehensive interface to supply dataset access, code submission, and later Query Builder access to remote and local SAS instances. JMP was very fortunate to hire Eric and John simultaneously, as it was rare to have more than one development opening in our small organization.

Eric and John then led the effort, with some help from Dave Barbour and Brian Corcoran, to rework the entire JMP Windows UI around WPF. This was an enormous change, the efforts of which we use to this day. This broke JMP out of the one-window MDI scheme into the existing multiple-window appearance. The attempt to rewrite WPF and .NET was so large that we had to delay the launch of JMP 9 to accommodate the changes.

Eric at JMP Discovery 2016Eric at JMP Discovery 2016Eric at JMP Discovery 2016Following the WPF effort, SAS and JMP started an attempt to use JMP as the front end and part computational engine for Enterprise Miner. As part of the Enterprise Miner effort, JMP was split up into separate DLL's (dylibs), a large undertaking in itself, which also explains the JEXP in many of our function declarations. Eric led the JMP side of this effort admirably, and when both sides decided to abandon the project, he accepted the decision with real grace. For his efforts with EM, Eric was awarded a 2012 SAS CEO of Excellence award.

Next on deck was the JMP Query Builder. Eric led that effort and did much of the design and coding, working with Bryan Boone and Brian Corcoran. Query Builder provided an easy-to-use interface to create complex SQL queries, and handily stored the information to recreate that query for later use. Its modular design made it possible to extend the UI to work with JMP files, via SQLite, and SAS datasets. Query Builder remains a powerful tool within JMP to this day.

In 2016, Jon Weisz and Brian Corcoran discussed the need for a web product to showcase JMP reports to users who were focused on collaborating with peers and were more concerned with the report content, rather than creating the reports themselves. This was the start of JMP Live. Eric was the obvious choice to lead this project, which was a major departure Eric leads a session at JMP Discovery Amsterdam in 2016Eric leads a session at JMP Discovery Amsterdam in 2016Eric leads a session at JMP Discovery Amsterdam in 2016from JMP both in its technology stack and in its behavior. Eric did the initial design work, as well as hiring on much of the JMP Live team that we have today. His decision to select node.js for the backend development was extremely important in the evolution of the product. HTML5 output, led at the time by Heman Robinson, was the choice for the report surface.

As JMP Live grew in effort, Eric was promoted to Distinguished Technical Lead to manage the team formally. This is a full management position but also recognizes Eric’s previous promotion to Distinguished Software Developer. Now four major releases in, JMP Live has evolved to be a very capable enterprise-level software product.

It’s also important to mention that Eric is a terrific teacher and presenter. He has appeared in numerous JMP Discovery conference plenary talks and has presented many technical papers at Discovery, most recently at Manchester. He has also given C++ lessons to the R&D group as the language has evolved. Eric, with John Schroedl, was also an instigator of adopting standard library routines, showcased in a JMPDev meeting. Eric and John also pushed us and trained us to adopt numerous C++11 features.

Eric’s career at SAS and JMP has been one of outstanding technical development, collaboration, and leadership. JMP has been fortunate to have Eric for 18 of his 30 years at SAS, and we thank him for his enormous contributions to JMP’s success.

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