Fresh out of college I joined a bank as a programmer, I was supporting the loans department. Then one day the loans processor people complained to us that the Loans Application System they were using is way too complicated.

They said they were processing 50-100 applications per day and they are unproductive in using a menu that has so many tabs (around ten) to click and never even entering a single value in it. People are already in queue, obviously waiting and when these people lost their patience they may take their business elsewhere. By the way that banking system we used were designed and built by a third party.

So my supervisor asked me to rewrite and redesign it, that became my first real world taste of building software. According to my users - that what we usually call them. They want to have all those important fields in a single page, they don’t care if they need to scroll down.

Good thing is that this banking system exposes an API to handle CRUD actions to their system. I then proceed to implement the front-end using HTML, Javascript and CSS. Then I implemented the back end in a proprietary programming language and JSP. At that time I know nothing about CSS. Due to my inexperience I made this code.

 <p style="position:absolute;top:140px;left:10px;color:black"> FUNCTION</p>
 <select style="position:absolute;top:140px;left:100px;color:black" name="cust.selFunction" id="custfunction" value="<%=sselfunction%>" onblur="init_func()">
 <option value="."></option> 
 <option value="A">A - Add</option>
 <option value="V">V - Verify</option>
 <option value="C">C - Cancel</option>
 </select>

 <p style="position:absolute;top:140px;left:220px;color:black" > Cust. Id</p>
 <INPUT style="position:absolute;top:140px;left:270px;color:black" TYPE="TEXT" CLASS="CTEXT" NAME="cust.txtcustid" id="custid" value="<%=scustid%>"  onblur="fillOnBlur(document.forms[0].custid)" maxlength="25" size="25" />         
 <a style=position:absolute;top:140px;left:460px;color:black" id="sLnk1" href="javascript:popcustid();">
 <img class="img" height="20" src="../images/search2.gif"></img></a>

I know this code is horrible, it’s a crap. But it solved their problem. If you are a web designer then you may noticed that I used CSS absolute positioning. The page has around 100+ fields and I manually and painfully computed their values with respect to left and top positions. After my first production release, I added new features from time to time until I left the company.

After 3 years of solely maintaining it, I took the time to make it less painful to enhance the code base for future developers and since I’m already planning to resign. I started with CSS and I fixed the absolute positioning issue. Then I told my supervisor of the changes I made. I was shocked with the reply. I can’t edit the project looks anymore. I mean the fields positioning, even it really looked better now. Why? Because my users are already get used to how it looks. I passed my resignation the next week.