The First Couple of Decades

I cut my teeth on Applesoft Basic and 6502 machine-code in the early 80s and followed it up with some C-64; before making myself learn Turbo Pascal by writing a full-page text editor inspired by WordStar, on early MS-DOS machines.

While I went to Penn State to major in Physics and … after realizing I wasn’t a good fit for that lifestyle … ended in Geography specializing in Automated Cartography and GIS.

While still in school, I worked summers putting my geography and computer skills automating plume contour line overlays on industrial site well-monitoring maps using sample grid data extrapolated from groundwater flow model output. The compositing system was AutoCAD, so I got well versed with DXF files.

First “Real” Job

AutoCAD helped in my first post-graduation job: building tools and processes to scan physical maps for conversion using proprietary line-image digitizing technology through AutoCAD and into ArcInfo.

Too much time at work – making deadlines negotiated from before my hire date – and not enough at home inspired me to find other employment.

First Escape Hatch

I found something that needed Pascal; an econometric time-series analysis package that originated in the early 1970s on mainframes and which by then was runnable on a variety of *nix platforms and protected mode-DOS.

After having a workable and useful technical project torpedoed by another group (internecine politics and turf wars) and realizing that I could only progress there when someone, or perhaps everyone, died; I decided to quit that sphere and entered the exciting world of “consulting” to find a less dark path to personal (and career?) growth.

Consulting (Sort of)

My VB, SQL, NT, and IIS exposure comes from this time, but my relative impatience with various clients’ lack of direction (for reasons varying by client) almost always led to boredom, and I begged for transfers between job-sites every year or so. Clients may have loved me, but I knew how little I had to do to keep them happy and I worried about skill-rot, self-motivation decay and not getting to make “bigger things”.

My consulting company was bidding on RFPs to do “projects” which typically meant websites and “portals” at that point. One particular project that I fortunately got connected to involved PC networked access to a large scanned microfilm library for deed records to support land title insurance document production. Since I had never “done” a full lifecycle client project before,
I wasn’t even aware of how much power I was wielding (it wasn’t clear to me at the time that I had any); and how live the organizational wires were (until sparks flew on bad contacts). The project was a technical success, and continued for quite a few years to be used, and had been ported to other regional markets as far as I can tell, based on job-listings I saw.

Our company’s situation turned badly. We had banked on “solutioning” using other providers “portals” as a framework base for application development. The portals had a high purchase/license cost, and our professional services also had a high cost. As more “web-developers” became marginally trained in
spinning websites, it became cheaper to just hire someone to spin a website from raw-files or use content-management software directly without expensive services, our days of portalizing ended quickly, as did the company.

First (Almost) Position of Authority

Technically it was more a position of responsibility than authority, as I would discover.

My previous manager at the project company left prior to the collapse and found me a position as a software “architect” fixing organizational processes and code performance issues at a company running insurance quote engines from data collected off insurance rate pamphlets. It was a small company at the time, and went through a lot of rapid turnover so that in a few months I was the most senior “software technical” person there and was given a nominal “executive” title, that came with absolutely no power as I later discovered. A boss was hired for me, who brought in some former co-workers and best practices from another larger company, took away my administrative system access, and made it impossible for me to fix the system when it started melting one month in the summer.

I left to be “more technical”, but also to study managers in a variety of technology organizations. The decade that followed was my .NET Mercenary Decade, but that’s another page altogether.

On to .NET Mercenary Years (1)