Spyder Project: Inspiring my company to the latest paradigm: Web Application

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In a hilarious episode of the iconic TV show Silicon Valley, a conference featured startups presenting their upcoming products. Each presenter started off with a statement akin to how they are going to change the world. Every startup, ad nauseum, which was a joke of the episode.

Only a few companies can make that claim, some you have heard of and some you likely haven't, such as Fairchild Semiconductor or Cisco. Of course we know of the FAANGs, Facebeook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, and we extensively use their products to this day.

It's natural for a startup to want to reach for the stars and change the world. Or on a personal level, people often say that "they want to make a difference", or have some major impact on others. Personally speaking, I know a lot of people have used the software that I've written, such as Directory Assistance back in the day, toll booths in the state of Indiana, hospital medical records, pharmaceutical clinical trial processes. While this is certainly a group effort, I can't help but to feel good about those accomplishments. Some of the bugs I created in those pieces of software, well, not so much.

But there was one time that I initiated something that changed the course of a company; an unforgettable moment for me: The Spyder Project at Oacis Healthcare

Just a little background on the technology of the day, around 1995. The internet was born in the 80s, but the world wide web was just in its infancy, developed by Tim Berners Lee. The Netscape Navigator browser, created by Mark Andreeson and company, had just come out. Then Internet Explorer (vomit).

But most companies were not aware nor could see the potential that this revolutionary paradigm represented. Companies were primarily building application software that would run on a specific platform, such as Microsoft-based PC, but some Mac applications. Installation of the software was the shipping of a physical CD disk or the next step in evolution, downloading of the executable from a company website.

Oacis Healthcare had a suite of products that were exclusively platform specific application software products, likely shipped on a disk to clients. Now it doesn't take a rocket scientist to impute that this was a risky, time-consuming and complicated process, and with so many different configurations of PCs available, fraught with problems.

The idea of an application on a browser was just coming into the minds of developers when one day I was having a conversation with a fellow engineer, Steve Hershey–we were discussing just such a thing when Steve said to me, "you know, the Orders product looks just like an HTML table".

I was one of the few developers at the time not working on the Orders product, which essentially gave doctors the ability to look at and judge prescriptions for their clients. But I was well aware of what Steve meant: it was the epitome of a grid.

I was playing around, on the side, with building HTML based pages and came up with the idea, "what if I can build an Orders product using HTML tables and corresponding pages?"

So, again on the side, I initiated a personal project to build a prototype of the Order product as a "web application", running as a set of HTML pages, initiated and run inside the Netscape or IE browsers.

As with all software products, one needs to understand the deep requirements in order to build a workable product. Not knowing the Orders product that well, I began a series of interviews with everyone who knew the product: VPs, to the product manager John Hatem, to various developers who knew the inner workings of the software.

I was between major projects and had the time and energy to pull off what was, as usual, an endeavor much larger than at first glance. I was trying to keep it on the down-low, but many people were very curious about why I was asking so many questions about a product that I had little do with – except for one VP, who, according to my boss Rick Larsen, complained about my effort and hit him with "don't you have your people under control?".