Working with Leonard again:  Praxis Data Systems

While I was working at the Informix Corporation in Lenexa, Leonard Pruett called and lured me back to work for him by offering me the same money.  I'd enjoyed working for him previously at Mission Critical Systems in 1995 but he'd been unable to pay me enough.

He'd persuaded his primary clients - Glenn Walters Nurseries in Oregon and the Toledo Metal Spinning Company in Toledo, Ohio -  to invest some money in his enterprise, which he called "Praxis Data Systems."  The idea was that he would continue to do maintenance on their existing systems written in HP's Eloquence while I worked to develop replacement systems in Informix.  He'd also managed to become a reseller for Hewlett Packard.

With this influx of cash, he rented an office behind the shopping center on the southeast corner of 95th Street and Antioch in Overland Park.  Never one to conserve money, Leonard also hired his stepdaughter Peggy as receptionist and took on a young Indian woman to develop parallel systems using Visual Basic and ODBC in Windows 95/98.  She and I shared the "development room."  She was very quiet.  In the months she was there, I don't recall seeing a single useable program from her.

After some time, Leonard and I flew to Oregon to install our new system for Glenn Walters Nurseries.  Obviously, a lot of my time was spent in migrating data from the old system to the new, as well as answering questions.  I remember that my system worked pretty well, but there was culture shock in that they had been using a cobbled-together system in Eloquence which enforced little data integrity, where my system was pretty tight and didn't allow for the "slam the data in and worry about its correctness later" approach they were used to.  The screens were different, the reports were different, the keystrokes were different, and people were frustrated.  It was a great lesson in the importance of involving the customer during development!

The upshot of this trip is that  the good relationship Leonard had enjoyed with Glenn Walters was damaged, and with it the cash flow began to dry up.

So we turned to our other customer, Toledo Metal Spinning.  This company was headed by two brothers, Craig and Eric Fankhouser, really nice guys.  Once Leonard and I had enough of a system to show them, we travelled to Toledo.  We dealt most with Craig, and he liked the system, but there was a long way to go.  I came back on my own later to migrate their data to the new system and hammer out some further enhancements.  As with Glenn Walters, the TMS legacy system enforced no data integrity, and I spent several days tracking down discrepancies in the accounting tables.

But Leonard was running out of money.  One day, we moved out of the office and into Leonard's home, where I worked for a few weeks.  Finally, my paycheck bounced.  Craig made good on it but it was obviously time to move on.

The lessons learned in my experience here were huge:

1.  Be careful about going to work for a tiny company;
2.  Always involve the customer as closely as possible when developing software;
3.  Budget lots of time for customer-acceptance and data issues.