The Teacher

My name is Deon Slabbert and I started my professional career as a pharmacist.
I left university with a B Pharm degree and a BSc (Hons) degree in Pharmacology.

This extra degree came in handy when I did my 2-year compulsory military service from 1988 to 1989.
This placed me in the privileged position to help set up a Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM for short) clinic at an academic military hospital.

Certain drugs have narrow therapeutic indexes. With these drugs, it is important to individualize dosages so they work as effectively as possible. This also means that just a little higher dosage may be toxic and just a little lower dosage may be subtherapeutic.

To calculate these exact dosage per patient, one uses mathematical modeling, taking various parameters into account.
That meant that we really hit the calculators a lot.
And working with manual calculators, also introduced the possibility of errors, which we obviously had to avoid at all cost.

The decision was made to develop a software application that will do the calculations for us and also store the information for future retrieval.
As I was working closely with the programmer, I decided, "I like this! I also want to program."

A friend from university introduced me to the dBase programming language using the Clipper compiler, and so my new career started.
By the way, this was before there was a thing called the Internet, and Microsoft Windows also did not exist.
It was MS DOS all the way!

After my military service, I managed a hospital pharmacy and built a Stock Order and Management System that reduced our stock levels from 7 months to 28 days.
As a result, we won the Pharmacy of the Year award out of 49 private hospital pharmacies.
I guess that was when I realized that I could make a career out of programming.

Because of this award thing, I was headhunted by a private hospital group and joined then in January 1995.
Also, in January 1995, I got my first client, an Underwriting Management Agency (UMA for short).
A UMA is a business that does all the work, such as policy underwriting, premium collection, claims handling, and claims payments on behalf of the insurer.

The hospital group bought a Managed Healthcare business in desperate need of a new software application.
I jumped in and in 4 days, I wrote them a temporary application with Microsoft Access.
I wrote the proper application for them over the next year with the Delphi IDE, (short for Integrated Development Environment), which is using the Object Pascal programming language.
By that time we Microsoft Windows 95 just launched.

For the UMI, I built their first applications also with Delphi.

Java was introduced in 1995. So I started to build some applications for the UMA with Java.

In 2000, Microsoft released the C# programming language.
I remember when I started to work with C#, I one day said to a colleague, "Look, they fixed Java!"
That said, Java was eventually fixed, and I love working with both Java and C#.

In 1996, I found two new clients. The one client was a dentist that worked for a major private medical scheme.
It was an interesting application as it was, among other things, checking how many times the same tooth has been pulled.
I am not even kidding here. Some dentists would charge the medical schemes multiple times for the same patient and the same tooth.

The second client was the national branch of an international emergency services company.
These guys needed better software to track all the roadside assistance they provided, and again, Delphi to the rescue.
Then one day, about two years in, they fired me.
Apparently the international company decided to standardize their system across countries.

Eventually, the work I did for the UMA became a full-time job.
Thirty years later, I am still building all their applications for them

I am telling you all this to show that I have learned a thing or two in the process.

The two most important things I have learned are:

• to keep things simple
• to keep things practical

These two things, simple and practical, are close relatives.
Please note that simple does not necessarily mean easy.
On the contrary, sometimes it takes effort to find simple solutions.

So, during these tutorials, we will keep things both simple and practical so you can be prepared for the real-world scenarios out there.

Hopefully, I can help you become a programmer in the shortest time possible.
That said, there are no shortcuts, only smart cuts!

You will still have to put in the hours.
It literally took me years to learn this stuff.
But it is an awesome ride!