Can you believe it's been 30 years since Bryan Boone first joined SAS? And 13 of those years have been spent right here at JMP!
After graduating from Wake Forest with a mathematics degree, Bryan spent some time in software development before joining SAS in 1994. He started with a project involving SAS InfoTap (a document search engine), this included using the new Java language to create an applet to index and search SAS documentation. Then he moved on to MetaSpace Explorer. He even earned his MBA from Fayetteville State University during this time!
Starting in 2000, Bryan moved into e-Commerce and worked on handheld reporting including support for Palm and Blackberry systems. SAS Risk consumed most of Bryan’s time between 2003 – 2011, where he first worked on Risk Dimensions and then managed a group of developers devoted to the same effort.
But it was in 2011 when he began to make his mark on JMP. He ran into an old roommate at a Wake Forest reunion who said he used JMP daily. Bryan decided to keep an eye out for positions within JMP and joined us to work on SAS integration and the effort to restructure Enterprise Miner around JMP (may that project rest in peace).
Bryan worked with Eric Hill and Brian Corcoran on the Query Builder for ODBC sources, and the Query Builder spinoff for JMP tables. These features were instrumental in providing a friendlier, more powerful interface to data access within JMP. The ability to graphically browse database tables, create SQL queries, and easily generate scripts to reproduce those queries has proven to be a game-changer for JMP customers. A SAS Query Builder was also developed to utilize this facility.
Bryan realized early on that JMP scripters would need support for accessing REST-based data sources. He developed HTTPRequest and the necessary OAuth2 authentication support for this purpose. He evangelized this feature to customers via conferences, blogs, and documentation. It has proven to be extremely valuable, as many JMP users have site-specific data that they need to access and HTTPRequest provides a toolbox to accomplish this. More recently, Bryan has enhanced HTTPRequest to be multithreaded through the aptly named Multi HTTP Request.
Bryan also played an important role in the development of JMP Live. He was enlisted to create the first publishing flow from the JMP desktop client to JMP Live. This included a lot of work on the authentication model between the two systems and was critical to the launch of the product.
Seeing the growing demand for access to Historian database systems, specifically OSI Pi, Bryan took the lead. He developed our initial offering, complete with a user-friendly interface to explore the available assets within the Pi framework.
Bryan gives a talk on JMP 14 at Discovery Summit 2018.Bryan has led the most recent Data Connector initiative and worked to recruit fellow teammates Neal Siekierski, Chris Hesser, and Will Morgan. Data Connectors and Python, in combination, will give JMP users power capabilities to develop data access add-ins to hundreds if not thousands of data sources. It will also allow those data sources to be integrated into JMP itself. Combined with the JMP Marketplace, this work will usher in an important new phase in JMP’s data acquisition capabilities.
Because he’s a hard worker and found a little spare time in his schedule, Bryan is also developing a Snowflake data connector that significantly improves data download performance to those systems over existing ODBC drivers. The need for a good, JMP-supplied engine, has been a frequent customer request.
Finally, Bryan is often called to help users with pressing, site-specific data access issues. Most of these are not even related to JMP, but to connecting to site systems. Most recent examples include Exxon, IDEXX, and EH2. Bryan is always helpful and effective in coming up with solutions to complex problems within these organizations.
Throughout his years at JMP, Bryan has been an exemplary teammate, developer, mentor, and JMP ambassador. It is because of leaders like Bryan that JMP development enjoys the reputation it has among users.
