What five years with the ABRA ERP gave me
I spent just under five years, 2007–2012, as a custom-development programmer at Abra Software. The job was clearly defined: a client had the ABRA ERP up and running and needed it to do something extra — a module of their own, a connection to another system, a change to a process the standard installation didn’t allow for. I wrote it to measure and traveled to the client to put it in place.
An office that changed every week
That “traveled” matters. Custom development on top of an ERP doesn’t mean sitting in one company and writing for one company. It means meeting clients across industries — manufacturing, distribution, services, whatever happened to need an ERP — and spending time with each of them on how they actually work. Not how the company describes itself to the outside world, but what the warehouse looks like on a Thursday afternoon, where invoicing gets stuck, or why a particular thing is done in Excel alongside the system when it shouldn’t be.
A programmer who spends their whole career in one application doesn’t see this. In a few years I saw the inner workings of many different companies, in industries I’d never otherwise have looked into. It was a huge boost to my career — not because of any particular technology, but because I learned to find my way around someone else’s business quickly. Today, when I do an ERP integration or customization for a client, that experience still helps — I know what to ask before I write the first line.
Technology that wasn’t at the forefront
In fairness, I should add the other side. The stack I worked with back then wasn’t modern even at the time I was working with it. Enterprise systems like ERP have long life cycles and conservative architecture — installations run for years, the customer doesn’t want to migrate because of a passing fashion, and the vendor, for good reason, doesn’t change the foundations under hundreds of installations at once. For a programmer, that means writing in technologies that have long since been replaced by newer ones elsewhere.
It wasn’t the company choosing against me — it was a logical feature of the field an enterprise software company does business in. It’s only fair to admit, though, that at the time it did nothing to push my career toward new technologies. I had to move in that direction myself, later and elsewhere.