The Poole gives in: how I started with Notes
Ed started a meme, and I tried to leave well alone. But of course I couldn’t (I’m a white male, and I work in IT. What did you expect?) So, here comes the rollercoaster, how I got started with Lotus Notes. Strapped in? Sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin. Guffaw.
I left university, a four year degree, at the ripe old age of 22, in 1995. After a brief summer holidaying and all that, I reluctantly left my Mac Classic, 28.8 modem, and my brand spanking new internet account (not many of them around then!) to start earning a quid or two. I began my career as a trainee accountant with the (then) Big Six firm Coopers & Lybrand, in London. The firm was quite unusual in that everyone had their own laptop, a chunky ole’ Toshiba, with Windows 3.1, Lotus Smartsuite, and some weird thing called Lotus Notes (version 3.3) on it. I recall being most impressed by the C&L screensaver at the time, which featured an animated image of the flagship offices down Villiers Street in London. Anyway, We logged all our auditing with this Lotus Notes thing, using a custom in-house application developed by a global technology team in Dallas. After a bump to Notes 4.52 on Windows 95 (now running on IBM Thinkpads) a couple of years later, little did I know that come the R5 timeframe, I’d be working with that global team in Dallas, helping to put together a most ambitious new release of the in-house auditing software. Heady times!
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself… how do we go from trainee accountant to Notes developer? In a fairly straightforward manner as it happens. I detested auditing, and accounting wasn’t much better. I really hated the full-on exams and hours of study on top of 50 - 70 hour weeks too. After a few all-nighters at work, and a failure in my second-year exams, enough was enough, this auditing lark was destroying me. So, some two months after the premature birth of our debut bean, I found myself making the first “leap” of my career (there have been a couple more leaps since!)
Luckily, I had something up my sleeve back in 1998: as an auditor, I’d been squirreling away with this Lotus Notes lark. We had full access to the Designer client in 4.x, so I happily knocked stuff together for my audit teams, and it was pretty well-received. I don’t know what this says about me (OK, I just don’t want to think about it), but something about Notes “clicked”. Up until then, my only experience of coding had been BASIC as a kid, plus fledgeling web development on UNIX in 1993… Notes development on Windows (against OS/2 servers) was quite a different beast. Anyway, I got in touch with an in-house technology group, they knew my work (!) and things proceeded from there, ending up with yours truly as a senior Notes / Domino / Java / web type within a few years.
And now here I am, almost thirteen years post-university, still developing, and doing accounting once again to boot—funny old world innit?
So, how’s about you? You want to tell us all about it, you know you do.
Posted at 19:56 GDT on 13 Apr 2008 | Categories:
|
There is so many similarities in our stories. I would have graduated in 95 but i went to a 5 year school; NU in Boston. I had a mac classic; my first computer. I started with a group of auditors and accountants at my first job. I stared with v3.3. My boss had one of those Toshiba's, it was pretty sweet and I didn't follow my chosen major in college. Im sure there are others. Did your Father travel to the states a lot in 1971 time frame? OK, bad joke.
Best
Salv