subject: A Programmer Story [print this page] A Programmer Story A Programmer Story
I started out programming in group 1 products back in the 80's, I was introduced
to Group 1 on the Main Frame Computer.
I used List Conversion, Gen Select, Merge-Purge Plus, Mailstream Plus, EZ-Letter, Code1 and Group 1 's inkjet/label maker program. All of these programs were used to process data for Direct Mail Jobs/projects, from 1986 - 1989 I specialized in Political data processing, I was in charge of maintaining the 7 Southern California Counties registrar voter registration tables, all together about 16 Million records, sub datasets of voter history data for all 7 counties and assorted other files such as ethic files for extracting ethic voters
from any county.
The products I churned out were usually cheshire labels, pressure sensitive labels, Political audits, data disks, data tapes, telemarketing lists, tapes, disks, reports, personal letters for special campaigns and causes, these files were constantly on the tape drives spinning.
I moved back to Chicago, ILL were I went to night school for my certificates
in COBOL programming, database design, business systems development and computer room management. I then went to work for companies in the Chicago land area.
In the 90's I started consulting, my first consulting job was teaching the
Clipper computer language to recent Computer Science graduates to support a legacy application that Montgomery Wards was phasing out, I was qualified because of my extensive dBaseIII programming experience.
When that contract expired, my next contract was in Scottsdale, AZ as a system administrator and developer of vitamin distribution company, there armed with my Group1 skills and Direct marketing knowledge I developed a production system on the SCO UNIX platform with SCO Servers, this was a first
for me, because I had not worked with UNIX per se before this, I needed to learn on the job fast, I was able to produce our first mailing after the 2nd week, this job had been done prior to my involvement by a Service Bureau on a weekly basis for several thousands of dollars. After about 3 months I had the system pretty much automated using shell scripts, that one version could be run over night as a batch process executed by CronTabs, or version 2 could be run from a text menu system, either system could be run remotely, I was able to teach someone with fairly low computer skills to run the system.
While working to create these systems, I also created a tape library system written in Clipper (the same language I taught at Montgomery Wards), this application was character based but ran on Windows 95, I also wrote a data conversion system to reformat, clean up and append the necessary codes to the brokered list we bought on a weekly basis. We processed, downloaded to an inkjet vendor, and mailed 250,000 - 350,000 records a week.
this process took about 16-18 hours in total every week, not counting all the maintenance needed to correctly manage the data. I received an award for this system after 4 months from the President of the Company.
After this contract expired, I returned to Chicago, IL and contracted with several companies that did Direct mail, were I used Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic to manipulate data before processing the data through the usual Government Certified software to qualify the data for postal discounts, and proper coding.
I became an expert working with Databases, eliminating duplicate records, merge-purge processing, suppression file processing, inkjet processing, sheet laser bulk personalization.
My skills at Visual Object oriented programming languages become very proficient, I became skilled using MS SQL Server, SQL programming, queries, SQL Server setups. installations, administration and overall development.
