This year I will celebrate 25 years of working with a product called Lotus Notes.  In the late 90’s IBM purchased Lotus and it was eventually renamed to IBM Notes (client) and IBM Domino (server).  But to me it is hard to expunge the “Lotus” name from my mind.

For me Lotus Notes and the associated job that exposed me to the product were a case of right place, right time.  I had been looking for a job for some time and after a few fruit unsuccessful interviews I was told by one job recruiter that in the current market I was ‘unemployable’.  Then a job came along where a company wanted to build a team for this new product of Lotus Notes.  While they said ‘prior experience preferred’ this was probably an optimistic statement.  On the way to the interview I decided to spend a few minutes in a local technical book store browsing and calming down before what I expected to be another ‘no’.  In there I found a book with the title ‘Lotus Notes in 10 minutes’.  I read it in five.  I went into that interview able to use the terms and talk about some of the concepts.  I am sure anybody with any experience would pick holes in what I said that day but as I recall I thought ‘I have nothing to lose, let’s just go for it’.  I had a job offer by the end of the week.

That started a career spanning Lotus Notes versions 3 through to 9 (and beyond).  It also enabled me to enjoy roles such as development, testing, design, analysis, project management, team management, consulting, troubleshooting, and much more.

These days my Lotus (IBM) Notes/Domino development is based around a complex application of about 20 databases and over a hundred script libraries.  Most times its development, sometimes design, but all of the time it is enjoyable – still.

I have a few ideas about connecting Lotus Notes databases to iOS so some of that may appear here as I progress.