About eleven years ago, I got involved in the development of my first “serious” client-server application using Visual Basic 3.0 and Oracle (using a data access API called Oracle Objects for OLE).

We were a small team of 3 developers working together for several months and, to be honest, I don’t think we actually knew what we were doing (well, I’m sure I didn’t! :-)).

I really enjoyed those times and it certainly was a valuable experience.

Back then, I had the pleasure to work with Manlio R.
Manlio was essentially what I consider a pragmatic anti-Microsoft guy; someone who fundamentally dislikes Microsoft but earns a good living by using Microsoft technologies.
He was so funny though. Whenever we would find a bug in Visual Basic he would smile and say something like “Microsoft is only good at building nice dialog boxes; Oracle/Linux is the way to go!”
It didn’t matter if our bookshelf was full of Oracle manuals as the software wasn’t that user-friendly or bug-free either.
Even WinWord would not pass lightly his severe judgment as the VI editor was a way better tool in his hands.

I haven’t seen Manlio since then, and we only stayed in touch with the occasional emails in the first few years that followed. Then I totally lost contact.
Manlio now has his own family and he is an accomplished J2EE/Agile developer.

How do I know? He surprisingly found one of my posts and, after so many years, he dropped me an email to say hello.

Thanks Manlio, you are the man!