From time to time I like to make a point of publicly recognizing people and companies when they exhibit excellence in what they do.
Today’s kudos go to Don Nguyen in the EDI Admin/Support department at Fry’s Electronics.
Two months ago Don approached us with a problem sending back AS2 Asynch MDNs to our SuperHUB AS2 system. Frequently, our system would close out the connection before completing the response. We started digging and found a collision bug in the built in AS2 handler. We made corrections, but could not put it into the production environment for some time (unusual for us). To my personal embarrassment, Don had to stay on us to keep this at the top of our priorities (there were a flurry of technical glitches in February). To his credit, he was always professional in a situation where I personally would have started getting annoyed.
We finally got the update in place. Unfortunately and puzzlingly, the problem persisted. This is the stuff that gets real hackers going. Getting to the hidden problem takes a good partner on the other end to provide continuous feedback and a good attitude. Don provided both. He stuck with us and always got back to me with helpful information in a timely manner.
Finally, working together we uncovered the problem. Not to get too technical, but the sample code that we based our AS2 system on included a connection close method immediately after flushing the buffer. For some reason the flushed buffer would not always make it back to the client before the close method killed the connection. We removed the forced close and, voila! the system functioned like it was supposed to.
For his great attitude, patience and helpfulness, my “hero of the week” award goes to Don Nguyen at Fry’s Electronics.
Todd Gould
President & CEO
Loren Data Corp.