By this time, I had worked at GSA for about two years. Lotus Notes was the web development platform of choice not because it was good, it was just what GSA had. After the first year, I had grown weary of the terrible data structure, poor HTML generation, and really the whole program just made me want to quit. My constituents at GSA who developed using Lotus Notes enjoyed the program for reasons I still cannot completely fathom. The best way I can summarize it would be that Lotus Notes made simple tasks easy, but it also made complicated ones virtually impossible. Which was lucky for me as we had some complicated projects coming our way.
I was approached with the concept of an employee recognition program that would operate like Amazon.com. Users would have a set number of points that they could award to their co-workers for various reasons as a means to provide peer-to-peer thanks and recognition. Users could then redeem points they had received for real merchandise, and a lot of the products were really nice! From day one, they wanted this to be managed via a website and the question “can we use Lotus Notes” came up. Now, my desire to move to a different technology was very well known. You might say my bias had undermined my opinion on the subject but I was adamant that developing a transactional application with Lotus Notes was a terrible idea. Fortunately, the other Lotus Notes developers agreed with me and said trying to develop this system with Lotus Notes would be difficult. I wasted no time in pitching my idea; I would become an Active Server Page (ASP) programmer and build this web site on the Microsoft development platform. It didn’t take much convincing before I found myself in a one week course on ASP. The class took place in an old, rundown hotel but I didn’t mind. I was reinvigorated by the prospect of becoming a “real” web developer.
The class was mediocre and the instructor was not an expert, but he knew enough to answer all the basic questions. During that week, I spent eight hours in class, grabbed something to eat on my way home, and went over my lessons from the day for the remainder of the evening. I lived, ate and breathed ASP that week and enjoyed every minute of it. I couldn’t get enough. I thought Web design was the career path for me, but programming with ASP had usurped it. Even after the class ended, I continued to work a full day and follow it up with another six to eight hours of study in the evening. I even began teaching myself how to construct databases to interact with my ASP applications. It was all coming together.
The biggest factor to my success as a programmer came from my job at GSA. They could have easily let me go and hired a programmer with all the knowledge and expertise necessary to begin working on this employee recognition project right from the beginning. Instead, my boss at the time Sally, decided it was worth the wait to invest in me and give me the time and training it took to become a proficient programmer. I don’t think I let her down. The employee recognition program, renamed the “Peer Awards Store,” was a massive success when it opened a few months later. I had never been prouder of any website I had built before this one.
I was definitely ready to abandon Lotus Notes for good and I sought to do just that. Every new project was pitched with the use of ASP. Lotus Notes rarely came up. After the Peer Award Store came a project management tool we named TRAX. It shared many similarities to modern day SharePoint, but it was streamlined to work how we worked. Yet another exciting project that made all thoughts of leaving GSA disappear. And bigger opportunities were coming shortly.
