Second era
Thanks to that experience I got a programmer job at a small Los Angeles company that built FileMaker solutions for the entertainment industry. We built systems for work groups in the big Hollywood studios, content management systems for all the TV game shows and talk shows, and even tools for a few stars to manage their (comfortable) royalties.
It was a thrilling period of my life, one where we always had to invent in order to answer our customers’ new needs and to make life easier for the users of our solutions. I remember in particular the joy of a production team making history programmes: it took them a week of hard work to break their films down shot by shot so they could settle all the usage rights for historical archives with dozens of companies or institutes around the world. Once the system was in place, it was all done in a few clicks.
FileMaker’s strengths for our market niche: extremely fast development in an industry where everything is done quickly, at the last minute and on strict budgets; flexible cross-platform deployment on Mac and Windows; and the ability to change features on the fly with no extra cost and no delays that would be unacceptable for the productions.
In short, we had our share of soda-and-pizza nights on film sets, finishing our programming by first light.
To be continued.
Third era
A few short years went by. Back to the old continent. A new line of work. FileMaker seemed to be drifting away from my professional life, only to return unannounced.
My life as a screenwriter left me stretches of free time and I was thinking about a second occupation, all the more so because my private life had taken a dramatic and costly turn.
A friend told me he had seen an ad from a Swiss company that runs several higher education schools and was looking for someone to administer and develop a FileMaker system as part of a local team.
I found the ad again online and a few days later I applied for the position, and there I was shuttling between Switzerland and Paris with wads of high-speed train tickets in my bag that never failed to intrigue the more scrupulous customs officers.
The system I discovered was enormous. It managed everything: facilities, registrations, courses and student grades, timetables, classrooms and food purchases. Everything.
On top of that, there were more than 100 users and remote access to the servers from several campuses and representative offices in Europe and Asia.
It was a system that would have cost hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs on another platform, and no off-the-shelf system could ever have brought together all of the specific functions required. At the time, though, the lack of a direct internet connection was a frustrating handicap for the whole IT team, and we dreamed of connection speed and of integration with our websites. FileMaker got there some time and a few versions later, a little slowly for my taste.
To be continued.
Follow the last part of the adventures of Jean-Yves Bosc, Programmer-Analyst, on our blog next week.