Dominux Consulting Blog

Today is the last day of trading for Dominux Consulting. Finished, done, shop closed, shutters down.

I started with Notes back in 1995 age 20 at my first job. I was doing general IT support and one day I was given a box with some floppy disks in it (Notes 4.0 I think) and told to install this thing on a server, roll it out to 80 people while relocating the company to a new office 40 miles away, the final instruction was “When you have done that, tell us what it is”. Very quickly I realised that it was not just an email platform. I had it doing web browsing (we didn’t have a TCP/IP network so it was a great way to get web pages over a Netware IPX network)  and NNTP news fairly quickly and then the company bought in a Quality Management System, which we customised quite heavily. After a while I figured that programming was much more fun than answering the phone (I am still pretty dreadful at answering the phone) so moved on to work full time as a Notes programmer, I then spent 15 years working for various companies including Dominux Consulting, my own little one man band. That brings us to today, in 2010 and the end of the line. I have now dissolved Dominux and I am now working full time on Free and Open Source software at The Open Learning Centre. The work is very much like it always was, writing great applications, on a solid and professional platform to solve business problems. The platform has changed somewhat though, I now use Alfresco for document management, Joomla! for web content management, Wordpress for blogs and blog-like websites including the very cool votegeek.org.uk with all these running on the Free and Open Source Ubuntu operating system. I think in future I will end up doing more work on applications based on CouchDB which is installed on Ubuntu by default and rapidly becoming the preferred back end for opportunistic application development, the type of little application that Notes gets used for. I find it interesting that for many years I have been told I use the one crazy database in the world that doesn’t even support SQL, but we now have a crop of NoSQL databases with a reputation for simplicity and scalability. The “Not a Real Database” marketing problem has been solved in style by the likes of CouchDB, but Notes and Domino are just acknowledged as something people used to use that has a NoSQL architecture. Notes might not be dead yet and this might not be the year of the Linux desktop, but both are coming close, it is pretty hard to be certain about either.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 2:56 pm by Alan Bell and is filed under CouchDB, Lotus, Software Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.