Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a joint mainframe study between IBM and a large financial services company in Europe. As part of that study also the customer's service management processes were explored and the goal was to figure out where and how...
Looking to start your open-source contribution journey? The Open Mainframe Project's Mentorship Program is announcing it's 2022 Summer Mentorship, which will start in June until August of 2022. So far, they have 11 mentorships for projects ranging from COBOL...
My mac had turned into a bit of a mess. I had ssh private keys (that use Passphrases of course!) in a variety of places and I wasn’t very happy about it. I have several different servers that I connect to. There are a few GitHub systems, a Linux system, and of course...
Delivering high quality service to end users is the primary mission of IT organizations. The importance of this imperative is steadily increasing as the world becomes ever more in entrenched in a technology driven digital economy. Thankfully, more tools than ever...
I have spent my career in the mainframe computing space. It's a strange and insular world. And it's shrinking a little each day, as the global mainframe workforce sees skilled workers retiring, transitioning to other roles, sometimes even dying, without a...
The Mainframe is, was, and will continue to be the most vital, most important, most consequential computing platform on the planet. Those who understand this also know that there is a talent shortage in this space. Some may refer to it as a looming problem, but...
Much ado has been made of the talent gap in the mainframe space. Enterprise mainframe clients have been metaphorically wringing their hands as the aging-out of their mainframe-savvy workforce metaphorically wrings their necks. A friend of mine, now an influential...
I spent 27 years at IBM in the Db2 for z/OS Development and Service organization, starting in 1989, when Db2 was already established but not yet the dominant data base leader that it would soon become and continues to be. To be a software engineer there during those...
Recently I rewrote the backend for my service, Any New Books, due to an Amazon API change. Generally speaking, rewriting an entire codebase is a bad idea. However, the code was quite old and the API changes rather drastic, so I took the opportunity to rewrite the...
Ruby was the first programming language I truly fell in love with. Yes, I had used several others before (and have since), but Ruby was and still is something dear to me. I can appreciate the usefulness of Python, the simplicity of Go, and the mind-expanding nature of...
