For many years VMRD customers have been requesting a software program that would support our ELISA assays. The development of such software always seemed to be a monumental, if not impossible, effort for a small, private company. At a certain point, however, I realized that we were wasting a lot of time, and creating a lot of error potential, by entering optical density (OD) values by hand. Not only did our customers need software, we needed software! This epiphany resulted in several weeks of furious code-writing on my part, the product of which was my first Microsoft® Windows® program. This creation designated “E-Z Reader,” only supported one model of reader and did nothing other than to retrieve and display ODs and export them into Microsoft® Excel®. Nevertheless, it gained something of a following in VMRD’s laboratories that persists to this day. The experience whetted my appetite for programming and I have devoured numerous books and produced several programs in the five intervening years since E-Z Reader’s debut in our labs.

With E-Z Reader’s modest success, an ELISA program no longer seemed completely out of reach. Nevertheless the constraints of my responsibilities at VMRD did not permit sufficient time to develop the software myself. My predecessor as marketing manager began the project using outsourced software engineers and I served in an advisory capacity. Development was severely hampered by language barriers and lack of continuity as programmer after programmer tackled the project. When I became marketing manager, I found that in addition to these problems, we had an identity crisis. Up to that point we had been calling the program “MyLab”—some customers may recall seeing that name in our 2003 catalog—a name that was already in use by several other companies. After much brainstorming and trademark searching I arrived, for better or for worse, at the name “ELISAWare.” The identity crisis was solved, but my new duties as marketing manager allowed me less time for programming than ever. Outsourced development had proved so chaotic that I abandoned it and the ELISAWare™ project ground to a standstill.

Public release of ELISAWare™ appeared indefinitely postponed until I met an excellent programmer named Eric Foryan. Instead of being half a world of iffy Internet connections away, Eric lived about four minutes from VMRD, and he was enthusiastic to work on the project. It was a new and refreshing experience to sit down face to face with a programmer, explain what needed to happen, and see evidence of cognition manifest in head nods instead of in instant messages in broken English. Currently working on a computer science degree at Washington State University, Eric shares my user-centric philosophy of software development. We believe that software should be self-explanatory, easy to use, and bug free. We believe that stability takes precedence over an abundance of features. We believe that the computer should work for the user, not the reverse.

As Eric became increasingly familiar with the program he became more and more concerned about the existing code. I had been pushing for rapid development, so he prefaced his request to rewrite with a number of apologies. He did not realize that he was preaching to the choir; I too had serious misgivings. After careful consideration we made a strategic decision to take the time to rewrite. It took some doing and it took some time, but the resulting program is so much better. I am sure that ELISAWare™ users will appreciate the stable and robust program that Eric’s rewrite produced. Very little of the outsourced code remains, so I am proud to say that this program is made in the USA. I thank Eric for his hard work, conscientiousness, and all the overtime he put in to meet deadlines.