Developer Career Tip #0038---Behind the scenes with Bob Lautenbach of Bayside Technology

Developer Career Tips #0038

Behind the scenes with Bob Lautenbach of Bayside Technology

This is the second in a series of periodic 'behind the scenes' looks at companies and individuals using Visual Basic. It's sometimes an 'eye opener' to see how others are actually using Visual Basic in their work.

For this tip, I interviewed Bob Lautenbach, who is the President of Bayside Technology, located in Marmora. New Jersey. You can visit the company’s Web Site at:

http://www.baysidetech.com

Question: What is your job at Bayside Technology?
Answer: I'm President of the company. At Bayside Technology, we do a little bit of everything, but recently have been heavily involved in PC-based and Internet based Benefit Administration.

Question: How does your company use Visual Basic?
Answer: We use Visual Basic as our primary development tool. We use it in our PC-based and Internet-based development, and rely on it to produce reusable components to interface with n-tier architectures with which we must interface.

Question: How did you and your programming staff learn Visual Basic?
Answer: Most of it is self-taught, along with an occasional supplemental course on specific development issues that are evolving quickly and with which we need to be immediately familiar.

Question: Do you use other languages besides Visual Basic?
Answer: Yes we do. We also use JavaScript, Java, VBScript, and ASP.

Question: Do you use third-party tools?
Answer: Yes, we buy and use various tools as they are needed. Most of the third-party tools we have purchased are reporting tools: Crystal Reports and ActiveReports. A word of caution: you need to bear in mind the viability of various third party companies. Know your vendor well--you don't want to purchase a third-party tool only to find out that the company has gone out of business, or doesn't have the resources to support changes to Visual Basic--such as VB.NET!

Question: What's it like to work at your company?
Answer: Our company is an incredibly exciting one to work for since our work is so cutting edge. We try to balance the unique needs of our developers and our client's needs with flexible working hours and telecommuting.