How did You Learn Lotus Notes?
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Recently, I was asked by a colleague: "How did you learn Lotus Notes?"
I truly didn't know how to respond. It certainly made me take a collective journey through my 20+ years of development experience to figure out how I got involved with this thing called Notes. Here's my story:
The year was 1994 and I was working at Lotus as a Technical Notes Trainer. I had been training customers on Notes Version 3 for a while and was looking for an avenue back into development. An opportunity arose to work at Iris and I jumped on it.
I was part of a small team that was tasked with making Notes more Internet savvy/aware. The first thing we built was the Notes NNTP News Server Task. My role on the project was to create the Notes databases/templates which would be used. While I was sitting in the same building with the people who wrote the core code, I was a little intimidated by them, so I chose to learn things on my own. As anyone who has ever developed a Notes database knows, it's 90% trial and error and 10% luck. I would occasionally ask a few people questions, but the response I usually got was "I don't know, it should work that way. Why don't you try it?"
LotusScript had just been added to the product, so template developers were charged with finding uses for it. Overall, it was a dynamic, exciting, frustrating and rewarding experience. The NNTP News Server probably shipped with Notes 4.x (go ask Barb Mathers - she would remember better than me). We next built the Web Retriever for the Notes Client, which essentially made Notes a web browser by using the ActiveX functionality of IE's Web Browser Control, but saving the pages in a Notes database. At the same time, another small group from Lotus was creating a Web Publisher for Notes which was eventually called Domino. Somewhere in there, IBM bought Lotus and the Lotus Notes Server became Domino--and I needed a break!
After taking a seven year hiatus from Notes, I was afraid of being lost within the many enhancements to Notes in versions 6, 7 and 8. Fortunately for me, it was like riding a bike, or putting on a comfortable pair of slippers. That's not to say that some amazing things didn't happen while I was away--I think Eclipse is one of the best things to happen to Notes in a long time. And, here at Teamstudio, we are jumping on the Eclipse plug-in bandwagon with a new version of our flagship design tool, Teamstudio CIAO!, which is context-sensitive within the Eclipse designer. For a Notes developer to have that kind of integration is something I thought I'd never see.
With the understanding that Notes is a dynamic and ever-changing platform, here is my advice to new Notes developers:
1. Forget everything you've learned about development in other products/ It doesn't apply to Notes!
2. If you're ready to hit your head against a wall, put it away for a while and wait for an "aha" moment.
3. If something isn't working consistently, bring somebody else into your office. It will behave for them.
4. If you're having trouble with it, somebody else probably has, too--so Google the problem and you'll likely find a solution.
5. In order to preserve your sanity, use Teamstudio CIAO! as your Notes source code control system.
So, to answer my colleague's original question: I never learned Notes, I just grew up with it.
Recently, I was asked by a colleague: "How did you learn Lotus Notes?"
I truly didn't know how to respond. It certainly made me take a collective journey through my 20+ years of development experience to figure out how I got involved with this thing called Notes. Here's my story:
The year was 1994 and I was working at Lotus as a Technical Notes Trainer. I had been training customers on Notes Version 3 for a while and was looking for an avenue back into development. An opportunity arose to work at Iris and I jumped on it.
I was part of a small team that was tasked with making Notes more Internet savvy/aware. The first thing we built was the Notes NNTP News Server Task. My role on the project was to create the Notes databases/templates which would be used. While I was sitting in the same building with the people who wrote the core code, I was a little intimidated by them, so I chose to learn things on my own. As anyone who has ever developed a Notes database knows, it's 90% trial and error and 10% luck. I would occasionally ask a few people questions, but the response I usually got was "I don't know, it should work that way. Why don't you try it?"
LotusScript had just been added to the product, so template developers were charged with finding uses for it. Overall, it was a dynamic, exciting, frustrating and rewarding experience. The NNTP News Server probably shipped with Notes 4.x (go ask Barb Mathers - she would remember better than me). We next built the Web Retriever for the Notes Client, which essentially made Notes a web browser by using the ActiveX functionality of IE's Web Browser Control, but saving the pages in a Notes database. At the same time, another small group from Lotus was creating a Web Publisher for Notes which was eventually called Domino. Somewhere in there, IBM bought Lotus and the Lotus Notes Server became Domino--and I needed a break!
After taking a seven year hiatus from Notes, I was afraid of being lost within the many enhancements to Notes in versions 6, 7 and 8. Fortunately for me, it was like riding a bike, or putting on a comfortable pair of slippers. That's not to say that some amazing things didn't happen while I was away--I think Eclipse is one of the best things to happen to Notes in a long time. And, here at Teamstudio, we are jumping on the Eclipse plug-in bandwagon with a new version of our flagship design tool, Teamstudio CIAO!, which is context-sensitive within the Eclipse designer. For a Notes developer to have that kind of integration is something I thought I'd never see.
With the understanding that Notes is a dynamic and ever-changing platform, here is my advice to new Notes developers:
1. Forget everything you've learned about development in other products/ It doesn't apply to Notes!
2. If you're ready to hit your head against a wall, put it away for a while and wait for an "aha" moment.
3. If something isn't working consistently, bring somebody else into your office. It will behave for them.
4. If you're having trouble with it, somebody else probably has, too--so Google the problem and you'll likely find a solution.
5. In order to preserve your sanity, use Teamstudio CIAO! as your Notes source code control system.
So, to answer my colleague's original question: I never learned Notes, I just grew up with it.
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