Hello World!

I’ve been with the NCH Software development team for awhile now, and I thought it time to introduce myself on our blog. I am currently on the Utilities team working on some very exciting new products that are moving through our development pipeline. You should see these released in the upcoming months and I'm looking forward to your feedback on these products. Prior to Utilities, I worked on improving several of our Telephony and Voice applications. For those of you who have migrated from Express Talk version 4.10 to 4.20, the colored indicator line lights and address book improvements were a couple of my first implementations at NCH.

When I was working my way through college I worked in the restaurant industry, where we constantly talked about the Guest Experience. Guest Experience was defined as everything from when a guest walked in the door to the next day when they opened up their leftover cheesecake box for another savoring. You have to pay close attention to detail to anything and everything that might improve or detract from the Guest Experience to make a restaurant successful. Feedback from our customers was essential to that process of success.

We employ the same philosophy at NCH Software. One of our core principles at NCH is designing software for the user experience. In fact, we devote a lot of effort to making sure that our software is as seamless as possible -- from the initial download until you are using our applications to their fullest power. I know that we talk a lot about the "3 Minutes or Less" user experience in the blog, but that is because it is important to us as a company across the board. We developers don't always get a chance to interact with the end user, which is why we ask Jen and Laura for input from you.

Shifting gears a bit, there is a very large software company based in Redmond, WA which has a mantra of "Eat your own dog food." Basically, it translates to "use your own software." We follow this philosophy in our offices too, using as much of our own software as is feasible. It helps us to continually evaluate and improve on what we do. We use Axon as our PBX, as well as VoIP products like Express Talk, and IVM to complete our telephone communications. In fact, I used Express Burn to create my portfolio CD when I applied to NCH.

We don't always get everything right the first time, we know that. No one is perfect. But that is just one more reason why it is so important for us to use our own products constantly and communicate with our customers; it helps us find the areas that can be improved. As developers who value quality, these ideals couldn't more important to us. Using our own products and hearing from our customers helps make us better.

David has been with NCH Software since early 2009 and is currently assigned to the Utilities division, where he is developing new products.