Careers today are in a constant state of flux - no more obvious ladder to climb from promotion to the promotion. I was thinking about this the other day, as I am working on an evolutionary change in career goals - yet again obfuscating any predictability about my career path. Something that came to mind was the first real software project I developed almost 15 years ago.

Just out of college, I was working at AMS - American Management System (now gobbled up by CGI). Things were a little slow in the group I had been hired to work in, so I was helping out another group. This other group was the Pen Computing or mobile computing group - relatively small, but very motivated group of people. The first thing I worked on was a user manual for one of their applications. I have to say - writing user manuals is not the most fun activity that I can identify. Luckily, I did a decent job on the manual and was given a one-man project to work on.

Being the mobile computing group, they had access to some pretty neat hardware. Back in the early 90’s there was a Pen Computing version of Microsoft Windows and Toshiba had a tablet computer that took advantage of the additional functionality in that version of Windows. The application was perfect for the pen computer - asset tracking. You would think that the asset management team would have been using asset tagging labels with bar codes - well, they were not (at least, not at the time). Originally, the team would go out to all the offices with pen and paper - track down the little label with the asset serial number on every computer, desk, chair, etc - and write it down - noting where the asset was located. After a full day of capturing serial numbers and locations - the data would have to be entered into a database. Think about it - that is effectively doing the same think two times.

Using the tablet computer, I wrote a simple application in Visual Basic that allowed them to do the same job much more quickly. I put their database on the tablet computer and basically allowed them to confirm or change the location of an asset. No more writing down long serial numbers (most likely with errors at times) - just check the label and confirm that asset was in the right room or location. Why a pen computer? A keyboard was not really needed in this situation - 90% of the time it was using dialogs to pull up a room and confirming all the serial numbers - point and tap. The other 10% of the time when a serial number needed to be entered or changed - there was a pop-up keyboard that the user could “tap” on to enter data.

It was my first real application that was deployed to users - nothing extraordinary, but it served a purpose. I imagine now they use bar codes and scanners to do the job - but you never know!