Contract Programming
The last two years have included some contract programming, which paid well for a few short intensive private projects. Most of my time has gone into politics, soccer, helping friends, home improvements, and being a great-grandfather.
Azusa Pacific University (APU) had been my primary employer from 1993 thru 2014. Many good years brought much success there. At first, I was the Manager of Programming and personally did a large portion of the programming. We installed the BiTech Accounting System called IFAS and the Student Records system from Software Research Northwest(SRN). We next defined many important statistics, such as who is a student, and which department had the primary major of each student. Because the reports written by programmers were exact, authoritative, and faster than many of the user written reports, most users stopped writing reports. So, we began the process of eliminating all the minor reporting languages except COGNOS for those doing research. After two intense years, I left for almost two years during which I consulted about GPA calculations and transcripts. In 1997, I returned full-time as Assistant Director. Another upheaval occurred in the early 2000's. I gave notice, took vacation, and resigned. My boss corrected the issue and "I returned from vacation" as the Associate Director up thru 2011, when I scaled back to being a PeopleSoft Developer.
APU ranked well in the years between 1995 and 2003. A number of years, US News and World Report scored APU in the top twenty colleges and universities. APU had extensive fiber networks early on because of the management by Ken Williams and the 'welding' skills of Jim Stoker. EduCause and Chronicles of Higher Education ranked APU highly because our clerks could handle much larger numbers of students. For financial aid clerks, the national average was about 400 students; at APU, 600 was common. The accounts receivable balances for APU were also extremely low, so the clerks were doing a good job. Mark Holmes enabled a kind of universal logon so that one set of logon credentials allowed the student or professor to access many archives and resources, such as libraries at UCLA, Harvard, Oxford, and other institutions.
In the last years, the new management took customer relations, design, and project management away from the programming staff. Whereas the five programmers once participated in the entire process, programmers became coders or QC persons. With such a narrow job definition, programmers lost salaried perks and became hourly, while the IT staff swelled with salaried designers, liasons, architects, documentors, project managers who could not program, and others. Trust factors declined and the fun disappeared. Many left or were squeezed out.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) took most of my time from fall 1989 to spring 1992. The Director of Programming, Cesar Diaz, hired me to reduce the enormous backlog of programming, which exceeded 330,000 man-hours. The AQMD had more than thirty programmers and thus the backlog represented a theoretical 10,000 hours per programmer or five years of work. Two thirds of the backlog requests consisted of some 6,000 requests for reports, particularly in the 4GL QUIZ. Artificial policies from an IBM mindset stated that a typical report required an estimated four hours of evaluation by a programmer to determine the 'supposed load' on the system and another twenty hours of programming. In actuality, no Cognos report could take but a fraction of the CPU and bandwidth; the estimate was a farce. Many of the requests were duplicates and many were stale. For unclear reasons, only programmers were allowed to write in QUIZ.
During my first ten weeks, I met regularly with each programmer. For each programmer each week, I collected into an individual folder on the HP3000, all the written notes and plans, the test scripts, and the software. Within the first four weeks, six quit because they claimed that I treated them like children. A simple comparison of those programmer's individual folders revealed a total lack of work. Having worked on their projects for at least two months before I arrived, and then having more specific direction from me, none had produced more than the boiler plate for a program. (I automated that task later on.) They had no development plan, no test scripts, incomplete usage cases, and vague strategies. After they left, Bob Kurumada and Bonnie finished the six projects in a few weeks. During the next year, about twenty found employment elsewhere.
I assigned a team of two Quiz programmers to the most essential requests. Richard Green was extremely fast and Ron Olson was very precise. Together they completed about seven requests each week, instead of the typical one per week or so. A very dynamic duo.
Hubert Wilson came to lunch after the normal hours, as did I. We started talking about his need for reports. I wrote a generalized interactive inquiry program in COBOL. The COBOL program ran in less than a minute for large samples, and the results were available on the screen, or on paper at a nearby printer, or later in Excel. Hubert quietly started sharing the program. Within a month, his whole floor was coming to his assistant. The program eliminated the delivery of paper reports by the computer operators. Within two months, the lack of paper reports being printed caused quite a stir for the Operations Department. They wanted to know who authorized such a program. The COBOL program absorbed many of the new requests with little or no programmer involvement. As we expanded the powers of the COBOL program to include all of the pollutants, we started allowing the requestors of many old requests to run the new report from their own PC.
Bruce Jeranek acted as chief QC for programming and as librarian. He was extremely competent, energetic, and insightful. One of his favorites retorts was "Validate your Assumptions." Kurt Miller had charge of weather stations, which were many instruments connected to a small computer, which sent data to HQ. His motto was "Eschew Obsfucation." He was self-managing and good in C and other bit-banging techniques.
John Grisinger was a visionary, and his ever expanding concepts irritated those who wanted to preserve the status quo, especially in technology. He went to the Air Resources Board near Sacramento. Ora McKuen also had vision, and she would have done better if she had good technical support.
<<Expand for Cesar Diaz, Flo Haya, Linda caballero, and Larry. >>
A new billing system and a new SMOG Bank were among the other important projects.
The Expansion Project consisted of twenty two thick notebooks of supposed specifications. My review revealed that some notebooks were simply numeric tables that had been converted to text. For example, "in row 2 column 7, the value is three thousand two hundred and fifty nine." The specs described 100 screens and 100 reports, but the specs did not define data flows from the outside sources. Neither did the specs define internal data flows. Also lacking were the six major processors: billing, summation, geographical representation, statistical trends, expiration processing, and one other. The on-staff AQMD lawyer, a Mr Greenberg, had similar reservations. He was not a programmer, but with his familiarity and knowledge about the AQMD, he could not see how the project would operate. When I appealed to delay final Request for Bids by six weeks, I was told such a delay would cost us much loss of respect. Before the end of 1992, much of IT lost respect and our jobs.
For some absurd reasons, the AQMD had chosen to adopt the Ingres database rather than the Oracle database for their Expansion Project. Supposedly Ingres could handle an unlimited number of rows per table, whereas HP Image and Oracle could only handle 2 billion records. No one wanted to understand that all three data bases used nearly identical integer addressing.
Since Ingres did not run on the new computer, an English programmer name John and I wrote in C to implement access to the Ingres database. We followed the functionality of the HP Database Engine. The interactive front-end for Ingres required fitting Ingres to the Engine. The SQL also required fitting. Both worked, but it was a goose chase. The Expansion Project imploded.
Venita Mathers took over IT; she and I had always wrestled over visions. However, she secretly extended my contract for three months because she needed insight and research into how IT worked, and how the software worked. She told me, "We have rarely seen eye-to-eye, but you have never lied to me. You always have substantial reasons for your opinions. I need your skills to make this transition."
After leaving the AQMD, Cesar Diaz gave me several contracts scattered around California.
Pilgrim Computer Corp (PCC) was my legal entity for contracting from 1982 thru 2006; many years PCC provided the main income for my employees and me. I filed the last tax return for the year 2007.
The Federated Group in the City of Commerce kept me and my employees busy from 1982 thru 1990. The two most important projects were the initial stabilization of their computer system and the new cash register system, which saved the Group some $40 million. The Group was first in many technologies. We used Capstand converyor belts, which interacted with the HP3000. We used Loran radio-controlled inventory guns in the warehouse. We had several kinds of credit card processing and verification. About 1987, the seven executives decided that they all had made tens of millions and that the big box market was ending. They sold the business to Atari, which struggled for three years. Since each store system was a complete business system, we installed one at Atari in Cupertino; it handled several marketing campaigns
National Electronics (NEC) with headquarters in Garden Grove, CA, hired me on November 2, 1981, and I contracted there beyond 1997. First I finished installing their HP3000 system, which the bankrupt software vendor had abandoned. The purchase order system and the inventory system which I had written earlier already worked. The generic inventory lookup enabled bids without part numbers across hundreds of thousands of parts. The NEC President Martin Hart knew what he wanted; he was a super user and a good boss. I brought up bookings and shipping. Later I customized their financials. In July of 1982, the vice presidents decided that I was too expensive, but a few months later Martin called me back as a contractor. As the company grew, my employee Joel Kinney acted as their DP manager and then became their employee. Sometimes we collaborated on projects; after Joel went to Hewlett Packard, I continued at NEC. We automated faxes in both directions; if the incoming fax came from a customer with good credit and the fax clearly described an order, then the computer would place the order in the picking queue and inform the humans. Via Verifone machines on the warehouse floors of customers, the customers placed orders; the system was called OneBin. Special programming was needed for TopArt and TopLine. TopArt published collections of Gerber files, which contained schematics of many chip and component manufactures. TopLine manufactured replicas of chips and high priced components, which were used in the training of robots on assembly lines.
Alltime Inc, in Santa Ana, CA, ran some 300 tiny stores in malls across the United States. Mr. K was the president; Rhode Lyons was the DP manager. Alltime was a customer of Munson Management Systems. As an employee of MMS, I wrote and installed the inventory and purchasing systems. The cycle counting module allowed each store to take physical counts during the day; the counts were reconciled against previous counts and transfers and sales. Machines called Datatrol's acted as cash registers. David Doyle wrote that software. From late 1978 thru 1982 as an MMS employee, and then as a consultant up to the bankruptcy of Alltime about 1984, I worked with Rhode.
Ken Roberts at Munson Sporting Goods started a subsidiary called Munson Management Systems(MMS). Munson Sporting Goods was the warehouser for Reminington, and that spawned the licensing software. MSG kept several hundred grocery stores and drug stores in the southwest full of toys and recreational hardware. MSG also had the largest wholesale inventory of fishing equipment in the US and maybe in the world. A former student named Curtis Stevens was working there; he invited me. I worked part-time from 1978 thru 1981. MMS sold HP3000 systems to run businesses. David Doyle and Gavin Scott also got their starts at Munson. An unfair and greedy coup kicked Ken out of MMS and the company folded within months. Ken re-organized as American Data Industries.
Victor Sherritt, Principal of University High School in Irvine Unified School District, hired me in October 1971, and I taught mathematics, history, and computer science up to September 1982. Anthony Anton as Chairman of the Math Department promoted an energetic classroom attitude, which led to excellent scholarship. A very high percentage of my students completed my courses, and of those, a high percentage took a subsequent course. Their average GPA with the other subsequent teachers was pleasantly high. During those eleven years, only six of my students failed, though about ten percent got D's. A student, Leo Kesting, had such perfect and rapid printing, we called him 'The Human Typewriter.' One year he performed so well of the challenge exam offered by the Actuarial Society of America, that the ASA sent a proctor to observe Leo re-take an exam and again do amazingly well.
As the sponsor of the Class of '79, I saw students succeed at contests, managing parties, sleep-overs, funding raising, and competitions between classes at school. Of the 434 seniors starting in fall of 1978, and 430 graduated on time. Three more graduated by the end of summer school. Students in drama learned stagecraft and painting techniques. For seven years, the Chess Club placed well in Orange County and also received national recognition in the publication Chess Life and Review.
During those years, I also helped some with data processing and some with teacher negotiations. For the teachers, I wrote a mini-spreadsheet that Tony Anton used during negotiations. It allowed recalculations "on the fly," or how would changes in pay-rates and steps would extend into retirement, taxes, and overall costs.
From 1970 thru 1982, I conducted computer contracting under the names OneShot Computing and Ramadata. Ramadata did calcuations and data conversions; OneShot mainly did statistics for PhD students at UC-Irvine. Teasingly, for years, I said that I have contributed to more Phd theses per year than any one else that I knew.
The last two years have included some contract programming, which paid well for a few short intensive private projects. Most of my time has gone into politics, soccer, helping friends, home improvements, and being a great-grandfather.
Azusa Pacific University (APU) had been my primary employer from 1993 thru 2014. Many good years brought much success there. At first, I was the Manager of Programming and personally did a large portion of the programming. We installed the BiTech Accounting System called IFAS and the Student Records system from Software Research Northwest(SRN). We next defined many important statistics, such as who is a student, and which department had the primary major of each student. Because the reports written by programmers were exact, authoritative, and faster than many of the user written reports, most users stopped writing reports. So, we began the process of eliminating all the minor reporting languages except COGNOS for those doing research. After two intense years, I left for almost two years during which I consulted about GPA calculations and transcripts. In 1997, I returned full-time as Assistant Director. Another upheaval occurred in the early 2000's. I gave notice, took vacation, and resigned. My boss corrected the issue and "I returned from vacation" as the Associate Director up thru 2011, when I scaled back to being a PeopleSoft Developer.
APU ranked well in the years between 1995 and 2003. A number of years, US News and World Report scored APU in the top twenty colleges and universities. APU had extensive fiber networks early on because of the management by Ken Williams and the 'welding' skills of Jim Stoker. EduCause and Chronicles of Higher Education ranked APU highly because our clerks could handle much larger numbers of students. For financial aid clerks, the national average was about 400 students; at APU, 600 was common. The accounts receivable balances for APU were also extremely low, so the clerks were doing a good job. Mark Holmes enabled a kind of universal logon so that one set of logon credentials allowed the student or professor to access many archives and resources, such as libraries at UCLA, Harvard, Oxford, and other institutions.
In the last years, the new management took customer relations, design, and project management away from the programming staff. Whereas the five programmers once participated in the entire process, programmers became coders or QC persons. With such a narrow job definition, programmers lost salaried perks and became hourly, while the IT staff swelled with salaried designers, liasons, architects, documentors, project managers who could not program, and others. Trust factors declined and the fun disappeared. Many left or were squeezed out.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) took most of my time from fall 1989 to spring 1992. The Director of Programming, Cesar Diaz, hired me to reduce the enormous backlog of programming, which exceeded 330,000 man-hours. The AQMD had more than thirty programmers and thus the backlog represented a theoretical 10,000 hours per programmer or five years of work. Two thirds of the backlog requests consisted of some 6,000 requests for reports, particularly in the 4GL QUIZ. Artificial policies from an IBM mindset stated that a typical report required an estimated four hours of evaluation by a programmer to determine the 'supposed load' on the system and another twenty hours of programming. In actuality, no Cognos report could take but a fraction of the CPU and bandwidth; the estimate was a farce. Many of the requests were duplicates and many were stale. For unclear reasons, only programmers were allowed to write in QUIZ.
During my first ten weeks, I met regularly with each programmer. For each programmer each week, I collected into an individual folder on the HP3000, all the written notes and plans, the test scripts, and the software. Within the first four weeks, six quit because they claimed that I treated them like children. A simple comparison of those programmer's individual folders revealed a total lack of work. Having worked on their projects for at least two months before I arrived, and then having more specific direction from me, none had produced more than the boiler plate for a program. (I automated that task later on.) They had no development plan, no test scripts, incomplete usage cases, and vague strategies. After they left, Bob Kurumada and Bonnie finished the six projects in a few weeks. During the next year, about twenty found employment elsewhere.
I assigned a team of two Quiz programmers to the most essential requests. Richard Green was extremely fast and Ron Olson was very precise. Together they completed about seven requests each week, instead of the typical one per week or so. A very dynamic duo.
Hubert Wilson came to lunch after the normal hours, as did I. We started talking about his need for reports. I wrote a generalized interactive inquiry program in COBOL. The COBOL program ran in less than a minute for large samples, and the results were available on the screen, or on paper at a nearby printer, or later in Excel. Hubert quietly started sharing the program. Within a month, his whole floor was coming to his assistant. The program eliminated the delivery of paper reports by the computer operators. Within two months, the lack of paper reports being printed caused quite a stir for the Operations Department. They wanted to know who authorized such a program. The COBOL program absorbed many of the new requests with little or no programmer involvement. As we expanded the powers of the COBOL program to include all of the pollutants, we started allowing the requestors of many old requests to run the new report from their own PC.
Bruce Jeranek acted as chief QC for programming and as librarian. He was extremely competent, energetic, and insightful. One of his favorites retorts was "Validate your Assumptions." Kurt Miller had charge of weather stations, which were many instruments connected to a small computer, which sent data to HQ. His motto was "Eschew Obsfucation." He was self-managing and good in C and other bit-banging techniques.
John Grisinger was a visionary, and his ever expanding concepts irritated those who wanted to preserve the status quo, especially in technology. He went to the Air Resources Board near Sacramento. Ora McKuen also had vision, and she would have done better if she had good technical support.
<<Expand for Cesar Diaz, Flo Haya, Linda caballero, and Larry. >>
A new billing system and a new SMOG Bank were among the other important projects.
The Expansion Project consisted of twenty two thick notebooks of supposed specifications. My review revealed that some notebooks were simply numeric tables that had been converted to text. For example, "in row 2 column 7, the value is three thousand two hundred and fifty nine." The specs described 100 screens and 100 reports, but the specs did not define data flows from the outside sources. Neither did the specs define internal data flows. Also lacking were the six major processors: billing, summation, geographical representation, statistical trends, expiration processing, and one other. The on-staff AQMD lawyer, a Mr Greenberg, had similar reservations. He was not a programmer, but with his familiarity and knowledge about the AQMD, he could not see how the project would operate. When I appealed to delay final Request for Bids by six weeks, I was told such a delay would cost us much loss of respect. Before the end of 1992, much of IT lost respect and our jobs.
For some absurd reasons, the AQMD had chosen to adopt the Ingres database rather than the Oracle database for their Expansion Project. Supposedly Ingres could handle an unlimited number of rows per table, whereas HP Image and Oracle could only handle 2 billion records. No one wanted to understand that all three data bases used nearly identical integer addressing.
Since Ingres did not run on the new computer, an English programmer name John and I wrote in C to implement access to the Ingres database. We followed the functionality of the HP Database Engine. The interactive front-end for Ingres required fitting Ingres to the Engine. The SQL also required fitting. Both worked, but it was a goose chase. The Expansion Project imploded.
Venita Mathers took over IT; she and I had always wrestled over visions. However, she secretly extended my contract for three months because she needed insight and research into how IT worked, and how the software worked. She told me, "We have rarely seen eye-to-eye, but you have never lied to me. You always have substantial reasons for your opinions. I need your skills to make this transition."
After leaving the AQMD, Cesar Diaz gave me several contracts scattered around California.
Pilgrim Computer Corp (PCC) was my legal entity for contracting from 1982 thru 2006; many years PCC provided the main income for my employees and me. I filed the last tax return for the year 2007.
The Federated Group in the City of Commerce kept me and my employees busy from 1982 thru 1990. The two most important projects were the initial stabilization of their computer system and the new cash register system, which saved the Group some $40 million. The Group was first in many technologies. We used Capstand converyor belts, which interacted with the HP3000. We used Loran radio-controlled inventory guns in the warehouse. We had several kinds of credit card processing and verification. About 1987, the seven executives decided that they all had made tens of millions and that the big box market was ending. They sold the business to Atari, which struggled for three years. Since each store system was a complete business system, we installed one at Atari in Cupertino; it handled several marketing campaigns
National Electronics (NEC) with headquarters in Garden Grove, CA, hired me on November 2, 1981, and I contracted there beyond 1997. First I finished installing their HP3000 system, which the bankrupt software vendor had abandoned. The purchase order system and the inventory system which I had written earlier already worked. The generic inventory lookup enabled bids without part numbers across hundreds of thousands of parts. The NEC President Martin Hart knew what he wanted; he was a super user and a good boss. I brought up bookings and shipping. Later I customized their financials. In July of 1982, the vice presidents decided that I was too expensive, but a few months later Martin called me back as a contractor. As the company grew, my employee Joel Kinney acted as their DP manager and then became their employee. Sometimes we collaborated on projects; after Joel went to Hewlett Packard, I continued at NEC. We automated faxes in both directions; if the incoming fax came from a customer with good credit and the fax clearly described an order, then the computer would place the order in the picking queue and inform the humans. Via Verifone machines on the warehouse floors of customers, the customers placed orders; the system was called OneBin. Special programming was needed for TopArt and TopLine. TopArt published collections of Gerber files, which contained schematics of many chip and component manufactures. TopLine manufactured replicas of chips and high priced components, which were used in the training of robots on assembly lines.
Alltime Inc, in Santa Ana, CA, ran some 300 tiny stores in malls across the United States. Mr. K was the president; Rhode Lyons was the DP manager. Alltime was a customer of Munson Management Systems. As an employee of MMS, I wrote and installed the inventory and purchasing systems. The cycle counting module allowed each store to take physical counts during the day; the counts were reconciled against previous counts and transfers and sales. Machines called Datatrol's acted as cash registers. David Doyle wrote that software. From late 1978 thru 1982 as an MMS employee, and then as a consultant up to the bankruptcy of Alltime about 1984, I worked with Rhode.
Ken Roberts at Munson Sporting Goods started a subsidiary called Munson Management Systems(MMS). Munson Sporting Goods was the warehouser for Reminington, and that spawned the licensing software. MSG kept several hundred grocery stores and drug stores in the southwest full of toys and recreational hardware. MSG also had the largest wholesale inventory of fishing equipment in the US and maybe in the world. A former student named Curtis Stevens was working there; he invited me. I worked part-time from 1978 thru 1981. MMS sold HP3000 systems to run businesses. David Doyle and Gavin Scott also got their starts at Munson. An unfair and greedy coup kicked Ken out of MMS and the company folded within months. Ken re-organized as American Data Industries.
Victor Sherritt, Principal of University High School in Irvine Unified School District, hired me in October 1971, and I taught mathematics, history, and computer science up to September 1982. Anthony Anton as Chairman of the Math Department promoted an energetic classroom attitude, which led to excellent scholarship. A very high percentage of my students completed my courses, and of those, a high percentage took a subsequent course. Their average GPA with the other subsequent teachers was pleasantly high. During those eleven years, only six of my students failed, though about ten percent got D's. A student, Leo Kesting, had such perfect and rapid printing, we called him 'The Human Typewriter.' One year he performed so well of the challenge exam offered by the Actuarial Society of America, that the ASA sent a proctor to observe Leo re-take an exam and again do amazingly well.
As the sponsor of the Class of '79, I saw students succeed at contests, managing parties, sleep-overs, funding raising, and competitions between classes at school. Of the 434 seniors starting in fall of 1978, and 430 graduated on time. Three more graduated by the end of summer school. Students in drama learned stagecraft and painting techniques. For seven years, the Chess Club placed well in Orange County and also received national recognition in the publication Chess Life and Review.
During those years, I also helped some with data processing and some with teacher negotiations. For the teachers, I wrote a mini-spreadsheet that Tony Anton used during negotiations. It allowed recalculations "on the fly," or how would changes in pay-rates and steps would extend into retirement, taxes, and overall costs.
From 1970 thru 1982, I conducted computer contracting under the names OneShot Computing and Ramadata. Ramadata did calcuations and data conversions; OneShot mainly did statistics for PhD students at UC-Irvine. Teasingly, for years, I said that I have contributed to more Phd theses per year than any one else that I knew.