---
title: Started at Quatrix
date: 1999-03-01
week: 1304
location: Craig Rd
geo: [38.667506,-90.43783]
type: work
---

A schoolmate, Andrew, who had also worked with the university CIS department recruited me to join the in-house project team of Quatrix, a local contract and placement firm. I had to learn ASP (VBscript) from scratch over the weekend before I started, but it worked out; I found satisfaction optimizing SQL and we were all what would be called “full stack” developers.

I enjoyed the freedom to do some [cutting edge work](/2003/11/26/client-servers-communicating-with-server-servers-through-clients.html) but my technical legacy was probably our “Foundation” template framework I created for managing large codebases that was apparently in production use at one bank and a logistics company for 20 years.

My soft-skills experience working at SLU proved surprisingly applicable. I was quickly promoted, replaced Andrew when he moved on. I somehow found myself being a director with a big desk, shocking many clients with my purple hair.
