Cool .NET RUP Gig in DC at the Federal Reserve

Melissa, Jack and Katrina came to visit me before I finished the contract in DC. The office was directly on the national mall.

One of the neatest contracts I've had was working for the Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governors back in 2003. Not only was the view cool -- check out that view from the cafeteria! -- the project was neat and the people were friendly.

I have a lot of funny stories from that contract. When I went to interview, somehow a mixup put me in a top-secret meeting of attorneys from all over the country. They thought I was some kind of FRB official, and I thought they were my interviewers. After I made them introduce themselves and say where they were from, and we stared at each other uncomfortably for a long while, we finally figured out that I was in the wrong room. They thought that was funny! I was told that the entire room thought I was ideal for the job. I'm just glad I didn't decide to raise interest rates. My house payment is high enough.

I also had a customer who told me that "you consultants do all of the work, and I'll take the credit." This didn't bother me at all, and I found the honesty refreshing. I hope he did well with the credit he got for our work.

The other consultant, Ted, always seemed to know most of the negative things in life I had missed. I would mention something happy, like I was taking pills to keep my hair from falling out, and he would tell me that the pills had strange sexual side-effects. I would say what a nice person Mother Teresa was, and he would say she was a suspected communist. I mentioned how I would love to get an airplane someday (Ted and I were both pilots) and Ted would remind me of all the hassles involved: insurance, maintenance, regulations, etc.

Hey Ted! If you're out there I hope you are doing well. So far I've still got most all my hair and I haven't grown any new sexual organs. But you were right -- the airplane idea was way too far-fetched for me right now.

We were using the RUP and doing a project to allow online voting for the Board of Governors -- the guys who vote to set the national interest rates (among a lot of other cool stuff.) The long-term benefit to the contract was being able to put the name "Alan Greenspan" on my resume, as he was really my ultimate customer. Now that Bernake is Chairman, I haven't decided what to do with Alan. I might just leave him on for another year. I took a bit of a rate cut to do the gig -- but the marketing potential made for an even trade-off. It wasn't a huge thing to do, but it does make for a nice ice-breaker.

I remember sitting down with the team and doing a Use Case Survey and an Analysis Model before we started. I got the strangest looks! I think they all thought "here is one of these pointy-headed guys who doesn't really know how to make software happen" From my standpoint it was funny also, as I was thinking "gee. These guys don't even know how to make software happen!" All over the world, I imagine there are a lot of meetings every day where all of the folks sit around thinking the other folks are lacking in some way. Part of the job, I guess.

We got to meet some really smart guys from Israel that were developing a secure file server system, called CyberArk. The things that system would do! We couldn't use it for what we were doing, however, because it was not a relational, transactional storage system. Secure file servers are great, but they are just not databases. Not yet, anyway.

So we did Inception in just a couple of weeks. We had a fast timeline, and I wanted to get moving. I believe within just a few months we had a working, accepted prototype program. My contract was ending in December and I got a call from Charles Schwab. The FRB also asked me to stay on for a couple more months, so I had to make a decision. After vacillating for a week or so, I decided to jump on the Schwab opportunity. Last I heard the system we wrote went into production. That's also a neat feeling.

It wasn't all happy stuff, though. I remember hearing the stories about 9-11 from the people who worked there. They stood on that balcony and watched the Pentagon burn. There were rumors of snipers in DC that day. A lot of people had to walk home. Ted and I used to think about how we would get out of the city if there were a disaster or attack.

But in general I really liked my last gig in DC. Working right on the mall, walking to work through Foggy Bottom every day past the State Department. Walking out for lunch past the White House! I guess the neatest thing about DC is seeing the other people who are visiting the city for the first time. Every day, thousands of people from all over the world go there, cameras in hand, oogling all the sights. Even better than the experience of being there yourself was to see the reaction from other people. And as they say in the south, you can't beat that with a stick.