My 2 years working experience as programmer in Singapore were purely developing window application. After graduated from Singapore Polytechnic, I worked at Essential IT. My main tasks was developing and maintaining end-user business application using Clarion Enterprise by Soft Velocity. Clarion is rarely used in Singapore and maybe in Asia as software development tools. I like to use this software because it’s almost the same as Visual basic since both of them has design view and coding view (with additional support of built-in threading features). It also provides built-in TopSpeed database (although you can use external database like SQL or Oracle) that supports import from various sources (csv, dbase, excel, SQL, Oracle, etc.) and reporting tools that directly link to the database makes your life easy as developer.
Working in this company, I learned how to configure point of sales bar code scanner (at that time, I didn’t know different country has different standard for bar code), configuring point of sales keyboard as well as printing bar code label.
In the middle of my employment, I was lucky enough to be sent to Thailand for Amadeus training. The main purpose of this training was to develop user interface using Visual Basic that connect to Amadeus server. I had a fun time during this training and learned a lot of travel-booking term.
After left this company, I worked in government sector as programmer as well. Working together with Senior System Analyst, with time constraint of three months, I developed delivery system for one of the biggest company in Singapore. Interesting part of this assignment was I need import and filtering millions of business and residential customers’ data from three different main resources with different data format. Filtering program was developed in Visual Basic to avoid data redundancy and ensure data integrity. Additional books allocation module was added in filtering program. Front end system, developed in .net, was used by bulk delivery, currier and logistics department. Based on the number of books allocated, each department will print out job allocation for their delivery personnels. This job allocation reports were generated using Crystal Report. At the end of the day, every statuses of the delivery will be updated to database by each departments. Back end system, also developed in Visual Basic will automatically run daily at 6 am in the morning to generate books reports, delivery reports and sent through FTP to our client. Back end system uses procedural programming created in SQL to generate those reports.