I spent the bulk of my career at a company called “Retail Solutions.” Shortly after moving to Providence, sight unseen, I joined in 2001 after interviewing at a converted doctor’s office in Lincoln, RI. It was a small startup. They had received a couple million dollars from CVS. They had hired a COO from a greeting card company. A troubled but prolific developer had created the entire stack: An Oracle database with a Kimball-style star schema on Stores and Items, a reporting website based on some technology long since dead, and a machine room just off a loading dock. Sadly, the same developer died in a head-on car accident with an oil truck while heavily intoxicated, and three developers inherited the stack. I was one of them.
The stack was based on an Oracle Kimball model with Stores and Items. The primary language was Delphi, and the primary environment was Windows NT. I liked Oracle but hated Delphi and NT, and I made it my mission to convert everything to Java and Struts, which I did, and it was a struggle amid pushback from my colleagues. At that time, the pushback on innovation was intense. The culture of software design had not percolated outside innovation hubs like San Jose, New York, and Boston. It certainly had not percolated to Lincoln, Rhode Island.
Retail Solutions had several developers salvaged from the Dot com bubble crash of…
