My first (and only as it turned out) contract job was for a company in Stevenage called Intrinsica Networks. They too did contract bespoke software development for other companies. They had a team or core programmers but preferred to take on extra contract staff if they had a lot of work.
I started by developing an application that enabled a user to create a design to be etched into the tops of integrated circuits. The completed design could be downloaded to a Scriba laser. These lasers were quite intelligent and the design to be etched was downloaded to them in the form of a simple program.
Once this application was complete I worked on a number of other Intrinsica projects until I joined the Taylor Hobson development team. This was developing a major application called μltra. This was developed to replace an existing DOS based program.
μltra controlled a range of industrial measuring machines used in various engineering processes. In essence the machines could measure how round or how flat a component was. The more accurate machines could measure with an accuracy of less than 1μm. When you discover a human hair is 80 times larger then this you see how precise these machines were!
Development was done in C++ using a number of different versions of Visual Studio. We would move to using the newest version as it came out. μltra was designed as a 3 tier (client, server and device driver) application.
The user interface was a reasonably standard MFC application. It took the raw measurements from the server and plotted them in various graphs. The user could ask for various analyses to be performed. These were performed on the server before the client displayed the results.
In January 2000 I ceased to be a contract computer programmer and became a full time employee at Intrinsica. This was due to the IR35 tax changes which made the greater security of a permanent job more attractive.
At some point I moved to working on the μltra server code, implementing new movement and measurement features on the various instruments. I also started to gain responsibility for managing other, more junior programmers.
The Taylor Hobson development came to an end in December 2004 and I moved over to the DRS project. This was my first introduction to C# development as I worked on a SOAP server that communicated with many clients.
The project was to develop a number of different applications used by a number of grades of examiners to mark exams. The system required a lot of support during the marking process and I found the level of work during the 2005 summer exams to be intense. I resolved to not face that again so I started looking for a different job. After some searching I received a good offer in May 2006, just as that summer’s exams were commencing. I escaped to work as a programmer at Renewable Energy Systems.