Boss Logic

After a year working for NeXT as a Campus Consultant, I left school to work at a small startup company that did NeXTStep development. I worked on a simple bug tracking application, a simple CRM, and our primary product which had the unimaginative name: "Document Manager". Marketing was not our strong suite.

Document Manager (DM for short) was a NeXTStep client/server application that stored document meta-data in a Sybase database, and stored the actual documents to a file store via a Unix server daemon that we wrote. I was primarily an Objective C developer focusing on the GUI front-end. Most of my development focused on database CRUD-type work, focusing on different types of search queries and optimization. Other developers focused on database design, or the design and implementation of the file storage daemon.

We didn't have a huge market for our product, but we had a handful of large companies (a big advertising agency and a big media company in Texas) that used it. An influx of VC money spelled the end of the company when we put all of our eggs in one basket, fired our sales staff, and bet the company on selling our technology to a publishing company called Framemaker. Framemaker's stock dropped 30% one day and that was pretty much the end of the company.

Sadly, as the company was folding, we were grasping at straws and I started working on porting our technology to C++. The pain didn't last long before the company went under. I still have the desk that I took home instead of a final paycheck.

Features and Functionality

• Stored documents and provide meta-data about the document as it is stored in the system.
• Allowed the user to setup complex access controls on documents.
• Fast search engine that would allow users to search on both document content and/or meta data.
• Tracks the development of a document through version history.
• Simple workflow functionality that allowed users to accept or reject new versions of documents.
• Email notifications based on document events (new versions, document creation, etc.)
• Allowed users to attach text or voice recordings as notes to documents.
• Included a simple report writer that would allow users to generate reports based on meta-data.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

I worked at Boss Logic for two years, right out of school. Because it was my first "real" job, and because of the nature of working at a startup - I learned a ton. There were all the technical things I learned, from the ins and outs of NeXTstep, to relational database design and SQL, to software practices like bug tracking, version control and project management. More importantly were the non-technical lessons such as the importance of focus, the importance of being part of a real team, and how a diverse set of people can all make significant contributions in different ways.

I still think that NeXTStep was one of the best development environment I've ever worked on. Web development felt like banging sticks together compared to Interface Builder and EOF (and some days, it still does).