January 3rd was the fifteenth anniversary of the implementation of some software that my team developed for the City of Denver’s Wastewater Management Division. That’s a good long time for software in this day and age. That time at Wastewater was the zenith of my IT career and the successful go-live event that morning was the peak.

If you own property in Denver County you get an invoice each year from the stormwater enterprise fund. That’s our software.

The software, dubbed Storm 2000, was a Y2K remediation but because of the one year billing cycle we had to go live in January 1999.

Over time the system grew to be the first in Denver to accept online payments, rolling out in English and Spanish on the first day.

For the geeks out there — our team was agile before agile was cool. We built the system as a Java native client and wrote our own server that ran, along with Oracle, on a Digital Alpha box running UNIX. The application, now known as StormMerge, has morphed to a richer native client, JBoss and Oracle running on a Linux cluster.

Thanks to Larry, Betty, Charles, Robert, Joanne, Ryan, Mecia, Santiago, Rodolfo, Bill, Bobbi, Sam, Ron and Richard — all team members at one time or another.

I’m beginning to tear up thinking about the high cool factor in working with you over the years.

As Mecia wrote in email, “StormMerge lives!”