My First Commercial Software

As anyone in the computer industry will tell you, family and friends will always call on you to do everything technical or to help them out with any computer related needs they have.

While this can be frustrating, when a family member recently asked if I could create a customer database app for his business, I was actually happy to oblige. As I make my way through college I find it useful to try and get involved in as many aspects of the computer industry as possible, so why not give commercial software development a go I thought.

The idea of the app was to be able to add and modify customer records and then be able to add orders to each customers records so you could easily keep a track of frequent customers and popular products. We also wanted to be able to create auto generated reports of the data, ie number of new customers since a certain date, total orders etc...

While the project wasn't particularly difficult (actually having used JDBC and swing a fair bit it was actually pretty straight-forward) it was interesting working on a project to changing specifications and needing to ensure a solid bug free piece of software. And whats more, knowing that something I created is being used on a day to day basis by somebody is actually pretty damn cool.