Woodland Communications was a small marketing and advertising firm when I joined it in December of 1988.
Over the years, it morphed into BizDat, with an emphasis on the internet
and its flagship product, PowerGroups.com.
Over the intervening years its focus shifted many times, going from designing sales brochures and ads,
to producing presentations for national sales meetings, to creating Filemaker Pro databases and designing web sites.
Each change of direction added a new set of applications and/or hardware to the office, and I was
usually the one called on to learn the new stuff and show everybody else how to use it. There was no training
budget, so I had to teach myself everything by reading the manuals and third-party how-to books, experimenting,
and (as a last resort) calling tech support.
I stayed with the company for as long as I did because I like the owners, Gary Walker and Cindy Hoesly, and
because I really enjoy having to reinvent myself every year or two. Learning new skills keeps life interesting, and
while small companies may not have all the perks that a large company can offer, you don't get pigeon-holed, either.
In January of 1998 I moved to Berkeley and began telecommuting. I started out with a Pacific Bell ISDN
line and subsequently upgraded to their basic DSL offering. I was one of the lucky ones in the DSL world,
and apart from a flaky email account (which I never used), my connection was fast, reliable, and virtually
trouble-free.
I used that connection heavily during the development of the PowerGroups web site. In addition
to the initial brainstorming design sessions, I contributed extensively to the programming for all three
layers of the application: stored procedures for the SQL Server back-end database, ASP pages for the
front end, and COM objects written in Visual Basic that handled communication between the web pages and the
database. In particular, I did stored procedures for the Links tool, and was responsible for all three layers
in the Tasks and Polls tools.
