Full Circle

I was cleaning up around my desk this afternoon, it’s a complete wreck most of the time and it’s been super bad for a while now, and I happened upon some notes I created somewhere in the mid to late 90’s.

Early in my career, around 1988, I worked for a company called AgData and one of their offerings was a chemical tracking application called ChemTrak. It was a chemical use reporting tool for the State of California and I had a bit of a fascination with it. I always wanted to write a version for Windows.

That’s where the notes come in. I was writing down what I wanted it to do. It was a pretty simple list but it would’ve been a great little Windows app.

Now, Agrian, my employer, does all of that and a whole lot more.

Anyway, here are the notes.

The idea was to make it simple and extensible. I was going to create a plug-in architecture so someone would write a .DLL the main application would know how to load. On the database side I was going to use a standard dBASE file format so folks could write their own reports using standard tools at the time. Apparently — at the time — I thought Borland’s ReportSmith was a good idea for that.

After AgData I worked at Microsoft, then Visio for 10 years, then did video decoders for seven years. I made some other stops in between.

Now I’m back working on Agricultural solutions. Feels good.