A letter to my mentor while he still lives

Mark Davies

God has brought many people my way who have at various stages in my life helped shape me for the better but this man I write about today helped me in a very great way to be the kind of me I am today.

You'd often hear these nice things being poured out at funerals when the man can't even hear you. Such a smart and convenient way to hide our cowardice. I refuse to be a coward so Mark Davies this is for you from the depths of my heart especially the left ventricle.

It's amazing the interesting way some paths cross in this life. I got a job with Rising Data Solutions in the year 2002 as a coldfusion developer. Rising Data at that time had their office in the Busyinternet building. I had a deadline to meet and decided to stay late to get the work done. A few hours after work hours, this man just came up behind me to ask what I was doing. I told him I was working on an inventory system using coldfusion. "Oh interesting. I have a coldfusion project and will like you to take a look", Mark said. I had never met him in the building before and I knew all the other offices well enough to know he wasn't working in the building so I just discarded what he said. The next evening I met Mark again when I went to make some photocopies at Busyinternet's copy center. He prompted me again about the coldfusion project he wanted me to see so I followed him after making my copies. It was true. He actually had a coldfusion project he was working on himself and needed help fixing some bugs. That was how Mark and I met. He ended up paying me to do the work from scratch for him. It was later I got to know he owned Busyinternet. Cool guy. He no dey rush - as we say it here.

3 years later I ended up working for Mark fulltime and that's when positive hell broke loose. Mark is full of ideas, too many of them. He didn't teach me how to program but stretched my programming abilities with the kind of requirements he desired in his projects. Back then we didn't have all these cool JavaScript frameworks that cook everything for developers these days. His project requirements were clear and no joke. I had to deliver. I made google search my best friend. With that kind of training there is no project I am unable to handle today. Thanks Mark for forcing me to dig deeper for solutions and never accepting "it can't be done" as an option.

Where Mark really sharpened me was in the area of interface design - the reason why a lot of people know me today. For my clean, sleek and user friendly interfaces. Mark helped me attain that height. He took my becoming a UI pro so personal and made sure I iterated over designs until every dot and line was in its right place. He stocked the office with books and at other times came up with alternatives to my designs with most flaws fixed. He pushed me to get simpler and less sophisticated with designs, reminding me always that less was more. He constantly teased me I had line-itis because I loved to use lots of lines in my designs. Well, after going through his mill I am today a better interface designer and information architect.

After breaking away to start Kursor Solutions, Mark gave me business advice and even gave me a copy of the spreadsheet he used to make his 5 year projections for his businesses.

Unlike my other articles I am keeping this one short because - less is more :). My mouth can only say as much as I will forever be grateful BUT my heart knows the real value of what my mouth is saying, especially the left ventricle.