I,
TKDTutor, have been involved
in the martial arts since 1968 when I stated training in
Shorei-ryu karate and Judo. I enlisted in the Navy in 1969,
and began training in Taekwondo and continued training in
Judo. I trained in and taught Taekwondo and Judo and trained
in various martial arts throughout my naval career until I
retired from the Navy in 1995 and began graduate school.
After earning a MS in criminal justice
in 1998, I again began training in Taekwondo, this time
under Master Michael Deese at the Winston-Salem Taekwondo
Plus school in North Carolina. After collecting books,
articles, and papers on Taekwondo and the martial arts, and
acquiring knowledge and experience from various instructors
of Taekwondo and other martial arts for decades, I decided
to create a Taekwondo web site to share my knowledge and
experience with others. After a few years of development, on
January 1, 2000, I published "Taekwondo Tutor" on the
Internet as TKDTutor.com.
In 2000, Mr. Deese became an
independent school owner and asked me to develop software
that would track students and print rank certificates, so I
developed a Microsoft Access database program that did this.
In 2001, Mr. Deese affiliated with the
Taekwondo America
organization, and became
Michel
Deese's Taekwondo America, and the certificate program was no longer
needed so Mr. Deese asked me to convert the program into an
attendance-keeping program.
In 2001, I completed
MARK1 (Martial Arts
Records
Keeper), which used a barcode scanner to record student
attendance and managed all the paperwork needed for a rank
testing. It completely managed a Taekwondo program and
tracked attendance in four other programs. As word spread
about the program, more
Taekwondo America school owners
started using it so I expanded it to include the compete
computerization of the
Taekwondo America testing process.
The
Taekwondo America
National Office asked me to develop a program to manage and print its
rank and instructor certificates. In 2002, they began using
my TASK (Taekwondo America
School
Keeper) program to manage their schools and students.
Due to the development of
TASK and more Taekwondo America
schools using MARK1, I changed the
name of the program to TASK2
(Taekwondo America Student Keeper) to better reflect
its purpose, and added more features. In 2003, I released
the revised version 2.0 of MARK1 as
TASK2. Sean Baxter, owner of
Concord
Taekwondo America in Concord, NC, provided many useful
suggestions for new features and ways to make TASK2 more
functional.
Since TASK2
developed gradually over several years instead of being
developed from the beginning as a distinct program, it
became sluggish, lost continuity between its features, and
its menu system became complicated and confusing to use.
Therefore, in 2005, I began a complete rewrite of
TASK2 from the ground up. Since the
new version was set up so that any martial art schools could
use it, not just Taekwondo America schools, I changed the
name of the program to TaskMaster.
As TaskMaster was nearing
completion, Microsoft released Access 2007, which added many
new features. I decided to incorporate the new features into
TaskMaster and convert it to
Access 2007. I also added many new abilities to
TaskMaster, set it up to
manage five separate programs within a school, and added
changes to permit me to sell it to the public over the
Internet. All this programming has been a major undertaking,
so the arrival of the new
TaskMaster has been slow coming.
Since the creation of
TKDTutor.com, I have had
ideas for more martial arts related programs and projects;
such as creating a generic rank test management program,
creating a database of Taekwondo techniques, and writing
Taekwondo books. Distributing all these things as they are
developed requires a business, so, in 2006, I established
TKDTutorage as the base
business for all the solutions (products).
Most software businesses have a
development staff with separate groups who work on each
application. Within an application group, some people work
on finalizing one version, getting it on the market, and
providing support for the it, while, simultaneously, other
people in the group are working to develop the next version
of the application. Since
TKDTutorage is a one-man
operation, one version of a solution is completed and put on
the market and is updated with additional features and bug
fixes, but no support is provided, At some point, a new
version of the application is needed. At this point, the
previous version is ignored and all work goes to the new
version
Since
TKDTutorage is a one-man
operation, all the separate solutions and the business itself
have to be developed simultaneously. At some point, it will
all get done and it will all come together.