AuditPad

In November, 2014, I was freelancing. Living in West Bend, I finally had felt I took footing. That’s when I met a duo from Menomonee Falls that were working on a software idea. They had tried to implement it with a guy before, but he couldn’t get much to work. I was much more successful. By the end of a couple months of part-time work, we had a great program working, replete with users, organizations, clients, comments, email notifications, and the questionnaire. The program was intended to be used in the execution of IT and security audits.

The first time I met Clint and Ryan, I visited them in their small office. Clint had found me on Craigslist (which is also how I got my job with Misix), saw my website, and invited me in. There I met Ryan, who I had actually known from the Net, for his 6502 Nixie clock. I brought along my HP TouchPad running an ArchLinux chroot. I showed off my skills, reverse-tunneling into my home computer with SSH.

They hired me for additional work, and we built AuditPad. Both Clint and Ryan contributed to its UI design, and were directing me what to code. They also wanted to use Firebase and AngularJS, which turned into a terrible idea for long-term maintainability reasons. But, it ended up working pretty well, and it was the first time I really demonstrated myself as a professional.

AuditPad, the application bit I wrote, was entirely client-side. It relied heavily on AngularJS and Firebase; the former was confusing to work with, and the latter often had service outages and sparse documentation. This application would not even load in a browser today, which is both a tragedy and blessing: a tragedy for those in the present, and a blessing because this kind of software will not appear in the record of history. The gimmick between AngularJS and Firebase was the data would live-reload on the screen. When it worked, this was nice, but when it didn’t work, it sank the entire application.

Ryan later hired me at Stack41 as the Vice President of Engineering.