Since 1994

1994 to 1995 : Exsol Solution Systems

So having not completed my tertiary Technikon studies due to various reasons, chief of which was their insistence on teaching COBOL as a major subject, I dropped out and had the difficult conversation with my parents who were funding my tertiary education with their hard-earned money.  We decided that I would focus my efforts on courses that would get me job-ready and we found Van Zyl & Pritchard was teaching a modern C and C++ set of courses, somewhat different from their usual course material, so I enrolled and learned ANSI-C Fundamentals, ANSI-C Advanded, and C++ & Object Oriented Programming.

This was during the turbulent times just prior to South Africa's end of Apartheid and the first truly democratic presidential party elections.

By June of 1994 I had interviewed at a few companies and Exsol thankfully offered me a junior programmer role in the company.  I recall the director I interviewed with sitting on the floor of his office, when I arrived, busy stripping the casing of a 21 inch CRT monitor so that he could install a touch-screen interface to it for one of the company's customers - an eye-opener to be sure.

The company was providing turnkey solutions to their customers based on document imaging and digital filing.  I started off working with the senior engineer on a C-based document scanning solution that read the document barcode on-the-fly and by the time the document was finished scanning it was saved into the correct directory and indexed in the database.  This was for a courier company running hundreds of thousands of waybills monthly.  We worked with a Microsoft SQL database for our data store.

As the company progressed, we moved onto a much simpler development environment with COM controls and Visual Basic interfaces which sped up development, and enabled us to work more with the customers on what they needed, and less on the technical aspect.

I learned a lot about dealing with customers directly, travelled to customer sites with salesmen and the directors, and broadened my development experience to include more of the Microsoft stack.