SICPA Industries of America (1996 - 1997)

Shortly after graduation from Virginia Tech (after a year-long contracting stint in Kyoto, Japan), I received a job at SICPA Industries of America, Inc., where I was an applications engineer in their Product Security Division. This section of SICPA was chartered with providing anti-counterfeit and anti-diversion services to their clients, who consisted of a who's who of high-priced, fashionable and trendy iitems that residents of Park Ave know and love.

At SICPA, we were very good at the ink business, thanks to years of "putting the green on the money" (my quote, not theirs), but our computer skills were lacking. So, when it was time to build a prototype for an invisible barcode tracking system, I was saddled with the task of teaching myself how to make a continuous ink-jet printer communicate serially with a specially modified barcode reader and a client application that recorded each code that was applied and scanned successfully.

Historically speaking, I was awful at programming. At Virginia Tech, I put some significant time and effort into coding using the still-bane-of-my-existance Fortran 90. However, once I had a purpose, and a user-interface in mind, I began to learn that I had some very solid programming skills. My engineering background gave me the ability to see things in a simple to digest object-oriented fashion-- something to this day that many developers that I have met are seriously lacking in. They would prefer to talk about how cool this servlet is or that XML DTD, but they fail to see the forest for the trees.

So, with more than a little help from yours truly, in March of 1998, SICPA gave birth to Hawkeye, a first of its kind invisible barcode tracking system. This system to this day is still a flagship product in their customer offerings and has made them quite a bit of money, I am told.

I have to admit that I still find myself yearning for the days of VB GUIs and MS Access driven databases. Alas, those days are gone and things have become more complicated-- yet very exciting.