Dan Hickman – ProModel Chief Technology Officer

This weekend, my wife finally convinced me to donate my old technology books to the local library.  I called the library to make sure it was open and discuss the donation process.  To my surprise and insult, I had to beg the librarian to take my books  .   The feeling I got was “Sir, I don’t want your overly large and no longer relevant books”.  How dare she!

This was an emotional event for me.  These books are absolutely key to having and keeping a job that I love.  You see, as an Industrial Engineer, I always feel “more dumber” than my Computer Scientist friends and colleagues.  Books are my great equalizer.  If I cannot                                                  outsmart you, maybe I can out read you!

I could not help but go through the various books.  There is one book in particular that stood out and I was not able to donate, “Visual Basic 6 Business Objects”.

Isn’t Rockford a stud on that cover.  Published in October 1998, I used this book a ton!  I hope my colleague Josh Holdaway is reading this.  Josh and I were working on an enterprise application for a very large pharmaceutical company and we used this book to help guide the design.  Without this book, I would not have survived several code reviews for sure.  Some of the ideas presented in this book are still with me today.  (One random, dirty laundry memory I have on this project is Josh and I were struggling to figure out a bug only seen in production.  We resorted to adding a bunch of message boxes and let’s just say we forgot to remove one.)

I kept this “overly large and no longer relevant” book for my personal collection.

Follow Dan’s Blog!

http://dansgreenshoes.com/