Frontline
Frontline was the name of the flagship product we created while building v.1 Labs Inc. I discussed v.1 Labs in a separate post. Architecting, Designing, Building, Testing, and Selling Frontline, and all the work, meetings and travel that went into it was one of the more insane times in my life.
I took a deep dive into COM, DCOM and IDL and I can tell you firsthand that this is a very deep, very slippery and very niche rabbit hole. Not for the faint of heart, but one that opened my pragmatic eyes to the way of the craftsman approach in software development. Interestingly enough, today, I tend to still favour Hexagonal Architecture (Ports & Adapters as explained by Alistar Cockburn). Which is ultimately the pattern we used (before anyone had described it as a pattern).
This was a time for learning the value of clean separation of concerns, to test first (which I had shrugged off as dumb in 2002), for learning to properly refactor, and the value of loose coupling and dependency management. Professional Tip folks, it's going to change in the future, whatever it is today, it won't be that later. Plan accordingly (cough * abstraction patterns * cough). This was a good time in my life from a professional growth perspective, even with all the insanity, I wouldn't change any of it today.