Joe Zanter

This is not a piece full of technical anything. It's a story about a boy and his dog...ok, not that. It is a story about how a Web-dabbling engineer created some highly useful apps for his co-workers and himself. We work in a metallurgical lab, which means, among other things, we study metals by looking at finely polished samples (let's call them "mounts," as they are often mounted/embedded in plastic) under microscopes. We like to number and keep track of these samples and their descriptions for reference, and to comply with the record retention requirements of our customers. However, a few years ago we became acutely aware of the limitations of our hard copy log (the mount book) for these samples. Even at only about 1,000 samples per year, the volume of data was too mu... (more)