I started working for (as it was then called) the Data Processing division at the University of Texas at Austin in 1987. After completing the programmer training program, which focused on Adabas and Natural, I worked for a year as an application developer until I joined the systems programming staff at the beginning of 1989, and despite many reorganizations and renaming that’s still where I work. (Today we’re the Administrative Systems group in ITS/Systems.) The line between systems programming (or systems administration) and application development has never been particularly hard-and-fast in our organization, so I’ve participated in development of several applications beyond my systems administration duties.

In 1995 we realized that the World Wide Web would be the future for application user interfaces. We weren’t impressed by the web development frameworks that we could find then, so I wrote a simple CGI scripting language for front-ending our mainframe Adabas/Natural applications. It was only intended to last for five years or so, but it wasn’t until 2009 that we picked Python/Django as our long-term web development framework.

Besides Natural and Python, I’ve written applications in IBM zSeries assembler, C, C++, and Ruby. I’ve also worked as a backup to the Adabas DBAs and was the DBA for our Tamino XML databases. (I’m fairly knowledgeable about XQuery, XPath and XSLT.)

My systems administration duties have centered around z/OS system exits, storage administration, and network administration, but I’ve also done some administration on Solaris and RHEL.