Started at Quatrix
A schoolmate, Andrew, who had also worked with the university CIS department recruited me to join the in-house project team of Quatrix, a local contract and placement firm. I had to learn ASP (VBscript) from scratch over the weekend before I started, but it worked out; I found satisfaction optimizing SQL and we were all what would be called “full stack” developers.
I enjoyed the freedom to do some cutting edge work but my technical legacy was probably our “Foundation” template framework I created for managing large codebases that was apparently in production use at one bank and a logistics company for 20 years.
My soft-skills experience working at SLU proved surprisingly applicable. I was quickly promoted, replaced Andrew when he moved on. I somehow found myself being a director with a big desk, shocking many clients with my purple hair.