Paving my own Career Path

  Being back in the   workplace a fter being independent for so many years was a surreal experience. T he reality of job parameters like having only a limited number of personal days and vacation days and needing to request approval to use them were so unlike anything that I had experienced for the last 20 years , there was a bit of a culture shock. On the other hand, there was an indescribable sense of relief in knowing my health insurance and sons’ tuition would be covered (all three of my sons ended up attending Rutgers).   W hen I was presented with a PC on my desk, I was thrilled to see that Microsoft Office including Microsoft Access was installed. Given my experience with MS A ccess, I knew that I could begin developing applications to help the Math Department run more efficiently without needing to install any additional software.     Prior to working in the Math Department, I thought I was behind the times since I had effectively been unable to keep current during th

As the years passed, we found that it became very challenging to keep Artisan going: the cost required to implement and support Clarity surpassed what we could reasonably charge for the product. As such, our business transitioned. We stopped pursuing new sales and attending trade shows, and instead focused on supporting our already loyal customer base, who were paying an annual support fee. We downsized, giving up our office in New Brunswick and scaling back to just the two of us working out of our home office.   After a few years, I felt a growing sense of urgency that I needed to do something else. Since we were not actively selling Clarity at this point, losing a client meant we would have no way to easily replace that income. We had been paying our own health insurance, and costs were skyrocketing. Additionally, we had three sons approaching college a ge and knew of the tuition costs in our near future.  While we worried about Jon's ability to keep Artisan Computer go

Original Clarity Software During the late 90s / early 00s the world of software development went in the direction of Web-based applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft started bundling Access as part of their Office application suite , branding the product as a database tool anyone could learn and use , not a heavy-duty development platform, as we had been using the product.   While we often discussed re-writing Clarity in more current technologies (Java and Ruby for Rails were considered), the reality of our business and constant customer phone calls did not afford us the time and space to redirect efforts into a full re- write of Clarity. And since we were now dependent on the income from Clarity for our livelihood, we did whatever possible to keep it going Here are some of the more memorable technical challenges that we faced :   Backend Database   Very early on in the development of Clarity we started using the multi-user “split database” approach with MS Access: data in a MS Acce