Neater Boat Info is an obsessive construct by Graham Osler.

Many moons ago I started my working life as research assistant using a command-line database (dbase4) and programming in Fortran.  

I continued working as a research scientist for a number of years, published a few papers and all the while dabbled with programming and databases.  I was particularly proud of my MS Access reference database that only got usurped when downloads of pdf and linkage between publications and reference software became common.

After leaving science, I spent many years working as an Information Analyst with the NHS in Scotland. I had thought the hundreds of rows of data I dealt with in science was large until I started dealing with hundreds of thousands of rows of data in the NHS. I spent a lot of hours writing SQL scripts to access data in patient management systems. During my time there I did an MSc in Software Development at Robert Gordon University.  I now work as an Analyst for another organisation and still get to play with databases on a daily basis. 

My partner Helen and I have owned boats for the past 15 years. Our first was a Shipman 28 that was very simple. Our current boat is a Vancouver 34 Pilot. Changing to that was a huge step up for us. That is what has lead me to try developing something a bit more structured to store information we seem to keep gathering on all bits of our boat.