Edmark

The software kids learned on, then the system the company ran on.

Edmark was an IBM subsidiary making education software for children — a real shop, with its own art and sound-engineering teams, its interactive titles built in Shockwave. We were hired onto the web team to take their legacy software stack and turn it into a web education platform, shopping cart and all.

Then it was acquired, and the work changed shape.

Then the company was acquired, and the work changed shape. Scouted onto the IT side, we led engineering on the intranet for the whole acquiring company — a multi-country operation that now needed one internal system: a company directory, an inventory tracker, the plumbing a large business actually runs on.

Two very different bars for right.

Software a seven-year-old uses has to be forgiving. Software a company runs on has to be exact. Same engineer, both bars — which is the whole point.