The eDiary.com Adventure

As Lucy waved goodbye I remembered many good times with her. We were together for several years and had shared many secrets. Now she was moving overseas, leaving me with memories, pictures and songs from what would probably be some of the best days of my life.

But the sad thing was that they were all over the place, in albums, diaries, letters, and tapes. I wished I could put them all in one place, on my PC. That morning, I decided to buy software that would do it. After going to several stores, I found that there was nothing available. I also checked the Internet. I found many diaries, but not what I had in mind.

That evening I read an inspirational article about Grace Hopper of the US Navy during WW II, the first computer programmer ever. So I decided if the software is not available why not make it? I would develop a program that did it all: a diary, email, and an organizer for music, pictures, and video, all in one.

I had taken a couple of courses in programming and but did not find it easy. I was not a geek. But I vowed I would do it.

The first question was what language? I had heard about Java and decided to learn it. I got a self-study book and a CD and tried to figure out what is a class, a method, and all the other stuff about object oriented programming. It sounded simple at first but got complicated pretty quickly.

As I was starting the programming, I spoke to a couple of boys in the neighborhood who were studying computer science at college. After they heard my idea, they asked, "how much software have you developed before?" I said that this was my first serious try. They said this was for professionals, way above my head, and to forget it. I knew it was an excellent idea and knew it could be done. But how? No one in our family was well versed in computers. The family that to moved to Lucy's place had a girl my age, Janet. We became friends quickly and I found out that her father was a computer programmer with a company called Infotech.

One afternoon as I was in their house, I asked her father a few questions and told him about my progress, how I had learned Java, and written a lot of code but now was stuck. He was very helpful. "This is not an easy project. It is a big project. Bring over the software and let's see what we can do", he said.

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