I started at Quovera in 1999 after a couple of successful years at PwC. I had realized that I wasn't on the partner track there, and wasn't likely to join that club.
I got a call from a recruiter while at JavaOne, and she got me in touch with Quovera (Millennia Vision Corporation at the time). They were just starting a web development practice, and they needed people to help build it. I was actually being courted by a couple of organizations: I had one offer to be an IT director, and another to be a manager for a startup, but Quovera won out.
MVC had a successful track record, and was on their way to being a 60 million dollar company. The director of the new web group was very dynamic, and there was so much business that we were turning people away. It was the peak of the dot-com craziness, and life was good.
My first assignment was the first dot-com that MVC had ever dealt with. It was a startup that had been trying to build a web site for some time without much success.
A company called Branders.com that dealt in branded promotional goods (you know, the sort of thing that you get as a giveaway at company functions, tradeshows and seminars that has the company logo printed on it). They had a number of people who had been in the promotional goods space for a very long time, and they were trying to build the best site possible for that business.
They had already started in the direction of Intershop which provided a Perl based store-front / catalog system. Our job was to extend Intershop to the level that was needed for this catalog business. We built a bunch of custom database tables, and added all sorts of things that rode on top of the Intershop code base. By the time we were finished, I'd guess we were using about 15-20% of the Intershop functionality, almost everything on the site was custom.
The most challenging and interesting part of this project for me was working on the piece they called "visualization". This was the set of web pages that would imprint a customer's logo on the product that they had selected. The guys at Branders had contracted with a company called Image Software to provide a graphics library that would do the image manipulation. My job was to interface this executable with the custom database and build a UI that was easy to use, allowing the customer to see exactly what the product would look like.
I had to build all sorts of interesting things, and then hook them into the Intershop code. I built a server that handled the image processing, and had to devise all sorts of interesting things to work around the limitations of the web and Javascript.
This project lasted over six months, and at times was extremely trying. It was a successful launch for the client, but it was a very painful birth.
After that, Branders decided to replace Intershop with a complete Java system and a completely re-done database model. They chose Blue-Martini as the catalog manager, and I was part of the team who helped in the conversion. It was almost as painful as the original development effort, although this time Branders had most of their developers in house.
When I finished with Branders I had a few short projects, and then came The Money Suite Company. This client had gone through a less than successful implementation of a new web site that they had designed. They had some pretty sophisticated intellectual property used to calculate risks and rates for life insurance policies. They had an overly complex design that used servlets and stylesheets to generate pages that they wanted us to improve for them.
So me and a couple of the other MVC guys gave them a more elegant design that was a little closer to the the JSP/Servlet model that is in use now. We built a model-view-controller system that was much more flexible. The trickiest piece was that their design requirements were that all state would be held in their engine (a database driven finite state machine), so deciding which page to display was a little tricky.
I am currently working at Price Waterhouse LLP as Senior Web Developer. I decided on PW for a few reasons. I have been trying for some time to move my career in the direction of management, and this job is classified as a manager position. Price Waterhouse also has some excellent benefits, including educational programs which will help me to complete my degree.
Price Waterhouse is one of the "big six" accounting firms, and does accounting, tax, and management consulting for many of the Fortune 500 companies. The division my group belongs to does the accounting for international assignees. These are (usually) high profile employees who are working in a country that is not their country of origin. What PW does is figure out what the compensation and taxes for these people should be (for example a Canadian working in Germany may get compensated differently, so we figure all that out and then figure out the taxes for each country for them).
My group develops the applications that PW uses in supporting this consulting business, and my job is to find ways to bring some of the power of the web to this task. Right now I'm looking at some web publication ideas that will allow PW to use the web as a more effective distribution medium. The first of these is the Worldwide Stock Reporter (currently beta), which is a subscription based service that large organizations use to keep abreast of laws about stock option reporting around the globe.
While at PwC, I designed and delivered several interesting projects, including the intranet site for the group, several Lotus Domino based systems (including the Worldwide Stock Reporter). I also supported the infrastructure and operational needs for the group, and managed a couple of employees.
The largest project I led, was the International Tax Data Organizer (ITDO), which was sort of like a web-based Quicken for international assignees. It was built in Domino to take advantage of the internationalization and multi-lingual capabilities of the web. The forms were all built in English and translated into Kanjii for Japanese assignees. For the most part these assignees were Japanese individuals on assignment in the US, and this system was entirely for PwC to gather the data needed to complete their US taxes.
We built a very sophisticated and leading edge system, so of course we ran into all sorts of opportunities to creatively work around software limitations. Internationalization is still very much a human effort, and translation (especially on subtle concepts like finance) requires people with good communication skills in both languages.
Prior to PW, I had been at Excite. I left Excite in May of 1997. This was my first experience in almost twenty years of working in the industry with losing a job. Prior to Excite I had never really worked in any high risk type of business, and I was always careful to be in a position that was critical to the organization so I always had good job security. I was pleasantly surprised to find that leaving Excite had almost no impact on my ability to find another job, and I had several offers to choose from within a couple of weeks of looking.
I worked as the webmaster for Excite Incorporated. Excite has been in business for a couple of years, and was named Architext Software when I joined. We changed our name just before we went public because we decided that "Excite Incorporated" reflected the fact that we weren't just a software company.
When I first arrived at Excite (December 4, 1995), my duties at Excite included operations, GUI design, HTML & Perl programming. I learned a great deal about Perl programming, and building reliable operational scripts.
After I had been at Excite for some time, I started leveraging my database expertise. I converted the Advertising Sales inventory system to a SQL Server database application with an Access front end. I also built a number of database driven applications with web front ends such as an employee phone number lookup.
Working at a startup is a great opportunity for seeing how far you can stretch. I have spent more time coding and learning on this job than any I can remember. Part of this is the fact that I am truly enjoying what I do. I love being a web master, and I really have fun doing all the different things that go into maintaining the Excite presence on the 'Net.
Previously I worked as a member of Sybase Product Technical Support department (Customer Support and Service) in Emeryville, California. I was primarily responsible for supporting the PC connectivity products. In Sybase terms connectivity is anything that connects to the database, so this includes networking issues as well as programming.
The job at Sybase is where I started learning about the web. I spent my free time learning HTML, and building a web site that contained a bunch of information that was needed by the other support engineers. Since I was a senior engineer, I spent about half my time answering questions for other support engineers. Once I saw the web, I knew it was going to be the best way to distribute frequently asked questions, so I jumped in with both feet.
What became obvious to me rather quickly is that somebody was going to make a lot of money if they could figure out a way to make it easy to find things on the web. I found Yahoo first, but it soon became evident that Yahoo was great if you knew exactly what you were looking for, but when you need to find an answer, that is seldom the case.
I stumbled on Excite because Netscape was using them for searching their site. After using this for a while it became very obvious to me that however the concept based searching works, it does exactly what I need when I'm doing research. I sent them my resume, and started work in December 1995.
I have been in the computer field for almost 20 years now, and have been working with PC's since before anybody knew what MS-DOS (or MicroSoft for that matter) was. (does anybody remember IBM ?)
Way back when I was a youngster, I went to a West Valley Junior College in Saratoga, Ca. where I got my first exposure to computers. I was taking calculus and we had to write some programs (in Basic). The college had an IBM MVS system (I think it was a 360), that you accessed using TTY style terminals (printout instead of a screen).
With the access to the computer terminals, I gained an appreciation for the addictive qualities of online computer games. I was particularly fond of the Star Trek game. I wanted to make it more interactive, so I learned how to program in APL, and converted the game into that ugly language (from Basic).
After a while I got a job in the computer lab there, and went wild with my programming. I modified the Star Trek program to have a warp drive that would act according to the theory of relativity ... Boy was I getting spaced out.
In a couple of years, I was still young and foolish, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I quit school and got a job. I worked for a small family software company called Alexandar Systems (3 people) that wrote financial software for banks. It was my first experience doing stuff that was "real world", and I didn't care much for it. It may have had something to do with the fact that I was programming IBM 5100 computers (which was a PC that ran entirely from tape). I remember the immense amount of time I spent waiting for the tape to find things ....
I was laid off that job (I probably should have been fired), and decided to remain unemployed (party!).
Eventually I went to work on a work program called CETA (it has since become JTPA) in Trinity County. I got sent to a drafting school in San Jose for a while, and then came back to Trinity.
I worked as a counselor in the county's Youth Center for a while, and then as a laborer on a "work crew". After that I worked as a maintenance man at the Trinity County hospital for a while. Eventually, the amount of time I was allowed (even with extensions) on the program ran out, and I was again unemployed.
A job for computer operator was posted for the newly formed Trinity County Data Processing department, so I applied. I had no idea what a computer operator did, or anything else, but I figured nobody else did either. The director of the department gave me a chance, and I learned all about NCR mainframes. I owe a lot to Bruce Blaney (the director) because he made me read the manuals from cover to cover. After a while, he gave me some tasks that involved programming in COBOL. I learned COBOL by reading the COBOL manual, I wouldn't do it again, but I was an expert pretty quickly.
Bruce jokingly pointed out a job in a trade publication as a software analyst, making mucho more than I was at the time. I don't think he thought I would apply for it, but I did. It was working for the Madera County department of Education.
Interestingly the new job was working with an older style of computer, so I got to learn all about working with card punch, and an operating system called B3. It definitely taught me the value of desk checking code. It is really a pain when you put a huge stack of cards in the reader, and wait hours for the compile, only to have it bomb on the first error. No more interactive compiling where you fix the error and then compile again. My code became relatively flawless, and I learned a lot about optimizing code based on the way the machine actually works.
I worked there for five years, and then decided I needed to get my kids into a better area for school. I got a job with John Muir Medical Center being their NCR VRX, and CAI products expert. It was a great place to work, and a great bunch of people to work with.
During my tenure (actually 5 years) at the hospital, I learned to program in assembler, moved away from programming to O/S support, learned Unix system administration, became a PC expert, and learned all about networks.
I learned PC's on my own, because I was fascinated by the little beast which was starting to have more power than the mainframes I was responsible for. I read PC magazine from cover to cover from it's first issue. I spent more time on BBS's than I care to admit to. Eventually I became the PC answer man.
As time progressed, the hospital made a decision to replace it's old computer system with a newer system and a network. I decided that I had done all I wanted to in programming, and networking was the future, so I opted for the network manager responsibilities (which was supposed to come with a title change). I went to all kinds of school on networking and network equipment, and in no time I was an expert in networking hardware and software.
After five years of waiting for the reorganization of the department which was supposed to give me my new job title, I decided enough was enough, and I started looking. I was offerred and accepted the job at Sybase.
Sybase was a good place for me to de-stress. The life of a sys-admin is an extremely high pressure one, and even though people who do tech support will tell you that it is high pressure, it's a completely different type of pressure. The beauty of being in tech support at Sybase was that even though I was still dealing with hundreds of problems, they were no longer my problems.
That is to say, when the clock struck 5:00, the problem was either put off until the next day, or somebody else had to deal with it. In the life of a sys admin, the problem is yours until it is solved.
While at Sybase I developed a reputation as a PC Connectivity guru, and spent a lot of time helping out other engineers with questions about PC's, Sybase, and networking in general. When Sybase opened their first CompuServe forum, I participated on my own time answering questions and helping people with PC related questions. I was awarded "OpenLine MVP" which was an award for people contributing to the success of the CompuServe forum.
Anyway, Sybase was where I got my feet web with the true internet. I discovered the web at approximately the same time that Mosaic was being released as beta software. I recognized the potential for the web as a source of information and knowledge transfer, so I spent quite a bit of time studying and learning about it.
In case you are relatively new to the World Wide Web, you may wish to read the NCSA Mosaic Demo Document.
There is also the Suggested Starting Points for Internet Exploration.
You may wish to use the following resources to keep track of the evolution of cyberspace and to find information on the Internet:
What's
New with NCSA Mosaic and the Internet.
Internet
Resources Meta-Index at NCSA.
The
Excite stock report
from Data Broadcasting Corporation
Again, thanks for visiting the Excite connectivity on-line WWW server. We hope to hear from you again soon. If you have any problems or suggestions, please feel free to contact me at:
Rob.Weaver@excite.com
Rob Weaver
Excite, Inc.
1091 North Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, Ca. 94043
Telephone: (415) 943-1200
Fax: (415) 943-1299