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!
Hey Claudio this is what you can call the blog power!
He he, you are so right! I’d better get used to it.
Many cooks spoil the broth.