My Biggest Failure (or How I Went From Draftsman to Programmer)

I spent many years as a draftsman before I got into programming full-time and this project ended up being a springboard. If you are wondering “How do you get from drafting to programming?”, I will tell you. I was hired by a small manufacturing company as a draftsman, by now CAD (computer-aided drafting) was becoming more popular and they had a very expensive package. I had been working with AutoCAD for a year or so and liked it much better. After a few months of being hired I discovered that the software we were using had it’s own scripting language and I could easily customize it to work the way I wanted it to. You see, I had taken some programming classes in high school so it was reasonably easy to teach myself the language. This lead to a drawing automation project that I undertook with one of the engineers. We had begun offering Process & Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID) to our customers and it was really nothing more than putting together a flowchart of sorts. We built the symbols and then wrote some code to put it all together. It made the process much quicker and thus, cheaper, to produce the drawings. This caught the eye of the company president who then approached us about authoring some software. The machinery – industrial blenders, dryers, formulators and valves – was quite complex and it took a long time (typically several hours or more) for sales representatives to generate proposals and price equipment for customers. The biggest problem was that customers were being sold equipment that couldn’t be made! We were asked if we could create software that would only allow buildable equipment to be configured AND streamline the process so that even an inexperienced sales rep could produce a proposal, with pricing, in 30 minutes. Sure! Why not? We were an engineer and a draftsman, the company had a single PC in accounting (an IBM XT, no less) and we had no idea what to use as a development tool. What were we thinking?!

The first thing we had to do was buy a couple computers to develop on. Well, first we had to decide on a platform. The engineer was an Apple fan and I was Microsoft. We came close to using HyperCard but decided on a Windows-based system and Asymetrix ToolBook was our platform. Our proposals were output to Microsoft Word and were built using MailMerge and hundreds of documents containing everything from paragraphs to just a couple words. I can honestly say that creating those documents is something you have to experience, words cannot describe it – definitely the worst part of the project.

We decided that the best way to build this software was to create a separate application for each but use a front-end that allowed the user to choose the equipment to build. This made development easier while still presenting a single interface for the user. We worked full-time for months collecting all of the information, designing the user-interface, writing code and testing but we finally had something to show the president and sales team. When the demonstration was over the president told us that we failed to produce what he asked for and fired us. I don’t know about the other guy but I couldn’t believe it! The president explained that it was our task to reduce the proposal generation time from hours to 30 minutes. He claims we failed miserably because it only took about 5 minutes using our software. He then laughed and congratulated us on a job well done. We still had a few things that needed work but we were just about ready to roll it out to the masses.

We wrote a manual and created the installation package. This was before the days of CD-ROM and so the installation was put on 3.25″ diskettes for distribution. We also had to have some security so that the installation was one-time only and the software “expired” after a certain time. It was then my job to travel to the offices of some of the local reps to install the software and teach them how to use it. Some of the more distant reps came to us. The software was a great success and ran without a hitch until Microsoft released the next version of Word. Due to the way we were communicating with Word we had to re-write some of the code to accommodate the update. This happened again with the next release of Word but by then we had hired an outside programmer to take over updates. I had moved from the Engineering Department to the Sales Department where I did inside sales but also wrote software, built spreadsheets and databases and served as technical support for our proposal software. My days as a draftsman were gone forever.

I have long since moved on from that company but stayed in touch with a few people. I was surprised last year to get an e-mail from one of the sales team. They were still using the software but started having some trouble – would I mind taking a look and fixing it? It turns out that some of the supporting documents were somehow changed and it was just a matter of fixing the merge. It was fun to re-visit an old friend but I was amazed to see that it was the same application that I had last seen years earlier. We discussed migrating the application to a web-based one but I didn’t have the time to devote to the project in order to get it done in a timely matter so it went to another developer. I understand it is close to being rolled out and I hope to get a chance to see it someday. I would be like watching your child grow to maturity.

So, my greatest “failure” lead to my career as a programmer. I guess it wasn’t really a failure. After all, we exceeded expectations and 20 years later the software is still going strong but whenever we get together and talk about it we refer to it as our greatest failure and laugh.

If you would like to know more about this project or have one you would like to discuss, please write to me at joe@joevalencia.site90.com.