Software Factory

My first job out of college was with McDonnell Aircraft Company, or MCAIR for short.  I started out my career there writing software for F-15 fighter jets.  I was on a number of different programs, some of which I can talk about, some of which I cannot. 

One of the nice benefits of the job was that they fully paid for tuition for advanced degrees, so I got a Masters of Computer Science from Washington University ('85).  As part of that I studied emerging Artificial Intelligent technologies as well as relational databases. 

At the time, MCAIR realized that they were going to go broke hiring software engineers, so they started a project call the Software Factory to reduce the amount of time it took to develop software.  They wanted to use a relational database as the underpinning and since I was the only person in the company who understood this technology, they tapped me for this team. 

The goal was to create a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool, a pretty formidable task back in the mid 80's.  The Visual Studio's of the world had not been invented yet, there were no Frameworks like Bootstrap, Source Control was very rudimentary and there were no automated build & test environments.  MCAIR decided that they should build one. 

This was probably one of the most interesting jobs I had in my life.  In modern day terms, I was the architect of the database design.  Since configuration management was vital to any large scale software project, we implemented a configuration management framework using Ada sitting on top of the database.  We called it the "Foundation" and it used the generic abilities of Ada to manage the management of files (like GitHub), as well as database entities. 

As the project grew, we extended our tools to a point where we could generate a tool to do version control on any type of data with just the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) queries.  By 1990, we had about 50 people on the project.  However, in 1991, the cancellation of the A-12 project removed a majority of the funding for this project.  During the course of 1991, we cut our staffing over 50% and one of the main project drivers was gone.   Shortly thereafter in a horrible career decision, I decided to go work for an insurance company. 

Kind of like a first car, I look back on my first job with happiness.  We were doing some stuff that was well ahead of its time.  Looking back on it, it was pretty rudimentary, but back in the 80's it was a big deal. 

(Note:  Cliff and Layna were probably the two best looking people on the project.  No wonder they got in the picture.  Yes, she had shoulder pads.  Yes, our monitors were really that big.  And most of the women at the time had the big hair thing going on.)