Lead CRM Developer

2000–01, BroadRiver Communications
Comments only; no documentation available.

At BroadRiver, a young telephone company, I was hired as "the UI guy." My job was to

• learn a specific customer-relationship management (CRM) tool, called Clarify;
• build and roll out our first product with that tool: i.e., enable our customer-service reps to use it; and
• teach other developers how to program it.

Clarify has its own language, development environment, and a complex customer- and inventory-management database. The development environment was a blend of Visual Basic (which tends to be object-based) and some object-oriented vocabulary and structures.

Part of the challenge was understanding the limitations of the language which were implied by the reference manuals. In other words, if I followed the examples in the instruction manuals, things worked fine. Often, however, I wanted to make more the system more user-friendly or more efficient, so I chose to use those examples as starting points, and built on them, using my experience in other languages. When I did that, things started to break. There were also challenges involved in customizing the Clarify database, modifying the windows to suit our purposes, and so on.

Part of my job was to teach other software developers about those "traps" in the language, as well as teach them what I had learned from the official Clarify courses I took.