I (Ward) jumped from research into commercial software development. Hired as a Smalltalk expert, I felt compelled to deliver on that promise. Loose oversight allowed room for innovation while still delivering a product eventually.
Product Development
Work programming was exclusively in Digitalk Smalltalk on the IBM PC.
WyCash Plus integrated bond trading and accounting software. Bond guru said it was impossible. We made it look easy.
Remote Database Schema Migration based on a distributed version of Smalltalk's incremental mutation.
Incremental Change Management that gave our project an online feel over sneaker net.
Robust Error Recovery from power fail to memory exhaustion, often without the user's notice.
Automated Testing including a test browser that lead our auditor to declare his needs met after the first few hours of his three day visit.
Reporting Framework that our customers cited as deciding factor in their purchase when I hadn't noticed that we'd built one.
Accurate Accrual Calculations in spite of traders and accountants disagreeing about simple things like when it's end-of-day.
Foreign Currency that correctly modeled the fungible and non-fungible unit with unlimited precision, even when prorated over arbitrarily complex funds.
Temporal Reports including forecasts and what-ifs.
Fast Date Arithmetic including generators for periods with definitions like twenty-one business days after the first Wednesday of the month.
Personal Projects
I wrote a few Smalltalk programs for myself unrelated to my work.
Biota two-dimensional artificial life where instructions appear in cells on a grid and the program counter and index register have a coordinate and direction.
At home I was still developing fun stacks for myself and family in HyperCard.