Because of the name and address work I was doing for a group of membership clubs and that they knew me as a software developer, they contacted me in 2002 to ask about my providing a membership solution for them – which I designed and built. This involved the production of magnetic stripe (mag stripe) cards, card readers and the relevant application and database. The application needed to be able to have multiple swipe readers as the clients would often have two or more devices in order to get members in as quickly as possible. It wasn’t enough to simply record each swipe as the client were specifically interested in generating mailing lists for members who had specific visit patterns. So I needed to build a database to contain each visit and to provide an easy to use front end that allowed them to create as many extracts as they wished. Future enhancements of this application included promotions, targeted promotions (when a member achieves the target the system plays a tune!). This dynamically generated SQL capability is a principle that I still use today to ensure that my users have the best facilities for combined data extracts.