The first contact for me with Nicotech dates from januari 2001. That month I left, together with a colleague, for Moscow carrying a functional design. The design described, in Dutch, a complicated expansion of an already existing complex software system. The idea was to have it built by the people of Nicotech. Because of the complexity of the design, we held a meeting with the building team (Volodia Sentchilo, Nicolay Adrianov and Andrei Ivanov) to present and clarify the design, if necessary. At that point I already notices that the people we spoke with had extensive knowledge about the existing system. Furthermore, reading and understanding the functional design was no problem at all. They even pointed to some inconsistencies in the design! I was impressed. After the meeting we were invited to have lunch in a restaurant. The borsj was very good. Thereafter, Volodia showed us the red square and gave us some useful hints for the next day when we went to see the city. The next two days were spent at the Nicotech office and the design was further explained, if necessary. It was not necessary. After 5 days in Moscow we returned to the Netherlands.

A few weeks later the work was started. Thanks to a stable remote connection, the building team was able to work on one of our local machines. To keep track of the progression a tracking tool was also provided by Nicotech. The speed of software production was so high that it became a problem to test things properly. So, we had to slow them down. The quality of the work was outstanding. Detected mistakes were mostly due to an inperfect design rather than to programmed errors. The work was done within the agreed time. It was a great pleasure working with this team of well-trained and intelligent experts. I learned a lot about programming. Moreover, I learned about cyrillic writing, Moscow, the russian hospitality, LADA that always starts at -15°, and what real cold can feel like in Januari.

Regards, Michael

Left to right : Andrei Ivanov, John Rooijakkers, Michiel Vork, Vladimir Sentchilo and Nick Adrianov. (Moscow, January 2001).