Woohoo! (Updated with pics and more details)

Breaking from trying to write about what I did in my 11 years and change with XTreme Computing and condense it into intriguing yet terse resume form, I started trying to stuff more into my office, and for giggles started doing the necessary eventuality of going though over 1000 floppies.  The goal is to see what is on them, segregate out blanks, copy off anything that ought not be lost (ultimately to be put on other machines or media, too), and store as compactly as possible the resulting collection of blank and occupied ones.

I got sucked in and hit paydirt.  I’d been wishing I had certain stuff from when I did VB support, particularly a utility I wrote in 1996 that most people in the department used and our Microsoft counterparts loved.

It lives!  Still runs fine, too.  I’ll probably post screen shots.

I also found a ton of sample code snippets I did to show customers how to do this or that, or get past a problem, and other stuff I messed around with.  Very cool.

Update:

Might as well add them to the same post!  I previously mentioned this in my software creation experience post and tech support tools post.

Click the pictures below for full size in a new window, which isn’t much larger but was too large to fit in the column, and will be much clearer.  Each one shows the content of one of the three tabs, though you don’t get to see what’s in the dropdowns.  This dates to 1996, so VB4 was current and the DOS basics were still supported.  The newest OS was NT4.

While the program icon was something cool I drew, the goofy toolbar icons are ones floating around in the world that I happened to use.  For internal use there was no need to be formal, and the program was purely voluntary; I saw the need and wrote it on the side.  Some of them go to things I thought I might do, but didn’t.  Even the buttons for modifying time zones and list of mentors bring up blank forms, and I may have never bothered, or even removed the feature, as those things were read in from text files anyone could modify anyway.

I don’t think this actually became a requirement, but many of the around forty people there ended up using it.  It was nothing more than a way of reminding the user to include all relevant information, organizing and presenting it clearly for second level support.

The cool thing about it was that it was 100% mine.  I had the idea.  I designed it.  I wrote it.  I tweaked and updated it.  I supported it, the little it needed.  I wasn’t waiting for someone else to finish part of it.  I wasn’t writing code, then having someone rewrite it to do the same thing differently but be hard to decipher.  I wasn’t waiting while someone decided what they wanted done, only to decide otherwise after completion.

I used common code to handle default text as a label, rather than cluttering things with separate labels.  Not always appropriate, but it worked well here.  I made the text purple in required fields, as well as having a status bar message saying it was required.  If the text got deleted or replaced with spaces, the label came back, but for purposes of formatting it all in the end, if the text was the label it was treated as blank.

The “about” form came up a random color for no reason except the fun of doing it.  Based on evaluating the form color, the text would either be black or white to retain the right degree of contrast.  There was even an Easter egg.

Given how much fun I had doing this and some other stuff, and the sheer excitement I rekindle remembering and talking about it, it’s really a wonder I didn’t go into programming.  That’s as much historical accident as anything.  I left the VB support job for the business, where we had a programming god and a couple of understudies.  I probably outranked all of them when it came to designing and perfecting outward appearances, plus knowing and internalizing the complete set of needs and considerations involved.  That’s what I do; learn and grasp the details and implications of everything involved, seeing connections others might not.  What does that mean I should do for a job?

1. Well these skills typically are required during the requirements analysis and design phases of a software development project.  They are also important skills during software testing.  I’d say Software Architect or a senior Software Engineering position however I don’t think you have the requisite years of programming experience that folks in those positions typically have accrued.  Software Quality Assurance (SQA) engineer might be a good fit.  Just a thought.

   Posted by  on  10/18  at  10:52 PM  from 
Page 1 of 1 pages

<< Back to main