Ornoth

Of all the places I’ve worked, the one I’m most proud of was Sapient, one of the first and most successful Internet consulting agencies of the Dot-Com Bubble.

And probably the thing that I’m most proud of about Sapient is the list of amazing and noteworthy clients I got to work with, including National Geographic Magazine, Verizon, JP Morgan, Staples, Vanguard, WorldCom, Wells Fargo, Cardinal Health, and many others.

But one client and project will always stand out in my memory: HomeLink and OfficeLink, BankBoston’s first Web-based banking sites for individual consumers and small businesses respectively. And because of that, I’ve retained a not-small pile of memorabilia.

Why does that client stand out? Because I was already a HomeLink user! I had been using the first iteration of HomeLink for a few years already, back when “online banking” meant installing the bank’s dedicated software, which used your modem and public telephone lines to connect directly to the bank’s systems!

In 1997, the bank wanted to scrap the old dialup system and create secure, online banking websites for home and business use. They came to Sapient to design and build it, and Sapient assigned me to the project, since I had already accumulated fifteen years of experience programming Internet-based information services.

Before I go on, don’t let the company names confuse you. When I first started using HomeLink, I was a customer of BayBank, who had licensed the dedicated dialup software from Citicorp. But in 1996, BayBank merged with the Bank of Boston to become BankBoston, who wanted to offer HomeLink via the Internet. They were in turn bought out by Fleet Financial, which became FleetBoston; which was in turn acquired by Bank of America in 2004. But unlike the company name, HomeLink survived all those mergers.

Now let me share some of my archaeological exhibits, beginning with the old BayBank days, back when I was a dialup modem customer, years before Sapient got involved. First there’s this branded mousepad and 3½” HomeLink install diskette (version 1.0c)!

Tho my favorite memorabile from the old BayBank system is this screen capture from the installation program, where a really mediocre drawing of the greatest Boston Bruins player of all time says, “Let’s log on,” while a huge disclaimer reads, “This is a fictional situation. In real life, Bobby Orr is not authorized to view your account information under any circumstances.” Effin’ priceless!

Moving on to Sapient’s design and development of the new HomeLink, here’s a couple of Sapient “design center” signs. We used these to direct client staff where to go when they arrived for design sessions and development checkpoints, and I kept dozens of these from my old projects. Note how the eventual OfficeLink site was originally named “BusinessLink”.

Finally, here’s some marketing materials that BankBoston produced for the new HomeLink rollout, along with a demo CD-ROM.

The client engagement began with the design of the consumer banking site. As that transitioned into the development phase, the design of the small business site kicked off. I joined the latter team, and did requirements gathering and user interface design for OfficeLink, but once those plans were signed off, we all rolled into a single, unified development team. I was on the project for about a year.

This was the best example of doing development on a product where I was already the intended end-user. As such, I was immensely proud of my contribution, the site’s rollout, and its long-running success in the marketplace. And it still stands out in my memory, even amongst all the other prestigious clients and projects I worked on.

Here’s an interesting postmortem article about a company called n2N Commerce. The comments are particularly interesting.

Work rant. Only interesting to geeks.

I’m working at a client site. Last week I had to ask the person who runs their testing team whether they test a particular feature before releasing their software.

The staffperson figured the best way to find out would be to do a text search on the files they use for testing. Nothing could be simpler, right?

Well, not so fast! This person was a unix weenie. So she opened up a commandline window and entered a find command and piping that into grep. Not so simple, but I guess it works for some.

Well, not really. See, those files had spaces in their names, which causes unix to gag unless you know how to deal with them. Our heroine didn’t. I continued to stand around, waiting for an answer, while she dorked around in a laborious attempt to enter random command options in hopes that something would work.

After several minutes of watching this farce, I suggested she consider using Windows’ find utility, which would have done the job in less than fifteen seconds, without having to rely on her all-too-fallible monkey brain’s recollection of unix’s intentionally difficult-to-use command set. My comment wasn’t even given the honor of a grunt.

After a few more minutes, our erstwhile heroine looked at me and mumbled, “I guess I’m going to have to write a perl script.” Yeah, you’re going to recreate an entirely new text search utility from scratch, when there’s a perfectly good one built into Windows, and when a little RTFM action might allow you to perform the function in the precious unix you apparently don’t know as well as you think…

But then the topper came. “I wonder if Eclipse has anything that would do this?” Yeah. I imagine a full, bloated Java IDE would have a search function built into it. Of course, that’s a bit like using a Boeing 747 to deliver your pizza, when there’s a perfectly good car standing nearby.

This is why it’s important to be technology agnostic. Your favorite tool may be great at one thing, but it’s not the only tool there is, and often other tools will do a better or faster job at solving your problem. A carpenter whose toolkit only includes one belt sander is pretty stupid, and it’s downright pathetic when he doesn’t even know how to use that properly…

Not to open up the whole OS wars thing, but I’ve never seen the appeal of unix, and I’ve worked on it a fair amount. Its editors suck, and its command syntax sucks. Not that Windows is much better. It’s incredibly inefficient bloatware, and is ludicrously susceptible to system hangs and crashes. And Macs remain an oddity, never anything more than a footnote in the personal computer’s evolution.

I stopped using IBM’s VM/CMS mainframe operating system back in 1994, but there are things I still miss about it. It was stable. Its commands were powerful *and* intuitive at the same time (OMG!!!). And in the two dozen years that I’ve been coding under other operating systems, I’ve never found another editor that could hold a candle to Xedit. In fact, I’m composing this very article in Kedit, an excellent Windows port of Xedit. It rules, although I'm also thinking about checking out THE

And while I’m ranting about work, how about this one? After struggling with mysterious database connection issues and seemingly resolving them, I was asked to walk some of the client’s clients through part of the system. In the middle of the demo, the system starts having database connection issues. I have to abandon the demo in shame and attempt to triage the issue.

What did I find out two hours later? The client’s client’s IT people were in the server room, physically moving the server around, and kicked the power cord, dropping the entire database machine. Great. They have all kinds of siloed testing and formal processes to move programs from testing through production, but they pay a generous salary to a big hairless ape who randomly takes the server boxes out for constitutional strolls around the server room! Gee, what are we gonna do today, Brain?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than a decade of consulting, it’s that no clients (and certainly no client’s client) should ever be allowed to touch a computer.