My Life at AV-BASE: Part I

It has been more than seven years since I first joined AV-BASE Systems and now it's time for me to go. I have submitted my resignation and I will be leaving near the end of November to help found a new company. I wanted to give all of you a letter explaining how much I have loved being with this company all these years, and explaining why I am leaving. You can feel free to talk to me about all of this as well.

My Life at AV-BASE: The Beginning

Back in May 1999, I had just finished my first year at Fanshawe College in the computer programming course. I was looking for a placement with the co-operative education program and I had not succeeded in my initial interviews. The school term had ended and my interview with AV-BASE was actually scheduled for the next day. If I didn't land this co-op position, there was nothing else available. Not only that, but I was competing against one of the top students in my class at the time.

I had my interview with Bert and Helen at their office in Lambeth. After the usual series of questions (there were no interview tests back in those days), we began discussing my experience of creating a Room Booking program for my church. We discussed the fun and the problems of designing software and then having the user add a dozen new requests afterwards.
We really connected based on my real-life experience and a few days later I was informed that I had the job!

I complete my first co-op position over the course of that summer in 1999. Bert and Helen then allowed me to work one day a week while I completed my third term and then I returned for my second co-op term on December 20th, 1999. I then completed my fourth term at school and immediately started working for AV-BASE full time.

When I first started, AV-BASE was about six months into creating the new Windows-based version, which they called WinAir. We were rebuilding the AV-BASE DOS product from scratch, maintaining only parts of the original dBase DOS database. It took us about one year to create this new WinAir Professional version and we have been developing it ever since.

Visual dBase 7.01 was entirely different from dBase for DOS and it took a lot of learning on everyone's parts. Those were the early days when almost every co-op student tried to persuade Bert and Helen to switch to Visual Basic or Visual C++ with MFC or some other language. Despite the whining, no-one ever cared enough to prepare a business case proving that other languages would be more effective. Bert and Helen were the ones forking out the cash for one year of development without a sale for WinAir so they needed serious reasons to make such a drastic change.

For my part, I immediately loved dBase and I'm sure you all know that I love it to this day. The native integration for database support was phenomenal and it was so easy to use. Rapid Application Development (RAD) indeed. Within three months, I had ripped apart my existing Room Booking program. I converted it from a Visual Basic program using an Microsoft access database to a Visual dBase program with a BDE-driven dBase database. I even stole the treeview-style menu that we use in WinAir because I liked it so much.

So I came in with little experience but I had crazy ideas about Object Oriented Development and Relational Databases. One of my first projects was to design the databases and algorithms for the Template MCN Links system, which actually worked out very well and we use almost exactly the same system to this day in WinAir.

Back then, I didn't know much about anything. The "Reliability" screen that still exists in WinAirSQL was my design and I can't help but laugh at myself when I look at that screen. I had a long way to go in terms of my visual design, in terms of understanding true OO development and figuring out what a multi-tiered system actually looked like.

My Life at AV-BASE: Part II
My Life at AV-BASE: Part III