I was hired by the National Film Board of Canada as a Web Programmer on March 17 1999. The interview was brief, I was introduced to our producer Michael, our manager Tim, and our Database person Sue. I started working the very next day in a modestly sized room where animators scanned their image sequences. The project that was given to me was entitled Norman’s Brain, a web site that was going to show the world all the wonderful things that our studio made.

I was given a web site written in HTML and Perl that did not seem to work. After some thinking I gave Tim two choices, I could learn how to install and program in Perl and continue working on the messily written code or I could start from scratch using ASP, a more convenient language for the kind of site we were thinking of doing. We ended up choosing the latter.

For many weeks, maybe even months I worked there while animators played their sequences over and over again on the amiga located towards the back of the room. Every day at 11:30 Tim, Sue and I went to the cafeteria and have our lunch. There we would usually run into some of the ACI Studio locals. After lunch we would go out for a walk followed by a return to work. Some days we went out to eat in Tim’s old long black car.

After a while I was relocated to an office where I would enjoy more privacy. There I was introduced to My Best Friend In The Whole World Louise. For a while I worked there while she and her co-animator Jean-Jacques denied me the right to see any of their work. While I worked in that office I developed a big cyst in my right eye.

Time passed by and before I knew it I was climbing up the NFB ladder... All the way to the third floor, into the tiny office Craig used to make the film "How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels". Sue moved into the larger office right next to mine. The conditions were far from luxurious but Sue and I were finally able to work properly together. In that isolated part of the building we did what I still consider some of the most creative web programming in our NFB careers.

Despite all the long hours and weekends that went into Norman’s Brain, the project was shelved. To my surprise, Sue and I remained employed. We were moved over to the History of Canada web site, a project directed by Marie-Josée. I was told that allot of money had gone into the site and that all of it had been used to produce content. They had not been very successful with the part of the project that involved computers and programming. Working on the History web site was different for me as it was more of a team effort. We had Rabah, our lead programmer. Between us I was the better programmer, but he was more Unix savvy. He was very good at finding tools on the internet. As time went by, the team grew. The web designers Donald, Somsay, and Marie-Jacques joined us. So did the html programmers Chantal and Mehdi. The first thing we did together was a site on the history of Canada called ECHO. It was all done in static html with the exception of the search engine and a few other site tools which were done in Perl. Throughout the making of ECHO most of the team was located close to where I had first worked. I found myself making many trips up and down the stairs. Once finished, the ECHO site was branded as a prototype. One of us forgot to register the name "ECHO" and now someone else has the rights.

Towards the end of ECHO, and after many months of planning, the whole studio moved to the second floor. The offices and desks were bigger, and we were together. Many meetings headed by people like David and Ines determined that a big history project was not feasible, it was therefore broken down into subprojects. Sue and I started working together on a recursive database driven web application using JSP and Oracle Application Server, two things Rabah had introduced us to. He himself had taken off to work in the wireless communications domain. He offered me a job paying twice as much, and like the truly devoted person that I am, I turned it down.

The next project I worked on was something called the Friday Website, one of the byproducts of the history project. It used the recursive function I wrote in JSP to generate the database driven pages. Oddly enough, this was a web site about how to make a web site. The team had its conflicts but we were happy. I was happy, mainly due to the fact that I was not fully aware of any of these conflicts. Most of the fighting occurred behind my back, and when people around me did talk, I could not put the pieces together. I contented myself with writing good code. Unlike Norman’s Brain, this database driven web site looked good. Also unlike Norman’s Brain, it had me scratching my head trying to implement features that were making the site less database driven. I spent many hours frustrated because Oracle Application Server did not supply error messages, and would crash very often. About this time Sue and I took a course at Vanier College. There I learned PL/SQL stored procedures and about the fact that Oracle Developer, like all Oracle applications, sucks. Even Sue vowed never to use it again.

While working with this web team, the way I saw my job at the NFB changed. I found myself being a 9 to 5 kind of person. I stopped dropping in on the weekends just for the heck of it. Through most of the Friday Site project I found myself with free time on my hands. I used that time to develop dynamic HTML. Ever since Chantal had created a word puzzle to help people chose another name for the history site, I had wanted to improve on it. She had done hers with an API that she had found on the web, I wanted to make my own. I also wanted to make a word puzzle that was easy to provide words for. And so I did. Whenever I thought I had a descent version, I would email the link to everyone in the studio.

Towards the end of The Friday Site, Donald left us, so did Somsay. For a couple of months we all started working on the kid’s section of the NFB web site. Marie joined us as a designer. We all worked on various dynamic html games while outside companies were contracted to do bigger subprojects. During the making of Kids we were joined by Alain and Serafim Junior. Junior and I got along really well, with him being Portuguese and a programmer just like me. He was a big Perl and regular expression fan. We were both horrified at the way the way things were being done on the Kid’s Site. Lots of last minute decisions, etc... Alain was a musician trying to get into the wonderful world of web programming. All this came to an end when our new commissioner decided to cut our budget short. I stopped working on Kids and and started working on an animation site for the ACI studio with Junior. Knowing the good quality of our IT team, it was decided that this site would be generated from an access database. This meant Sue and I would once again work together. We had a few disagreements concerning the design of the database, but in the end I respected her decisions. I don’t recall many dates associated with the projects I worked on... Sadly enough I know that on September 11, 2001 I was on the initial phase of the animation web site. Junior was still working with us at the time. In October, as I had planned months before, I went to visit my relatives in Portugal.

When I got back from my vacation, morale was low. It had been a while since Mehdi had left us, Junior had just been fired, and the animation web site had suffered some major alterations. Thanks to my new found calmness I was able to adapt to all the changes with relative ease. Things started to pick up after a while. The animation and kids web sites were actually put online. I spent my days working on the animation site generator and helping Alain with his JavaScript. The word puzzle that I had made was getting good attention, it helped lift my spirits. I also ported the ECHO search engine over to the Cyber-terrorism site, that earned me a nice little credit. Towards the end of the fiscal year Tim told us that our contracts would probably not get renewed, and they weren’t. Even Tim’s so called permanent position at the NFB was terminated. I don’t regret my 3 years at the National Film Board of Canada. I learned, I enjoyed myself, and met many interesting people. May my future endeavors be just as fulfilling!