Born to be an Integrator

My IT journey started in the 1980’s when I was a high school junior learning to program BASIC on a Commodore 64 and saving my programs on a cassette. Back then, there were no real graphics, so I was using PEEK and POKE to read and write to “screen memory” by character position to write a video game. My senior year, I started programming COBOL on a Honeywell terminal connected to the district mainframe using an acoustic coupler MODEM - an ancient device for connecting computers over a telephone landline at a blazing 150 bits per second.

My next stop was DeVry University in Irving, Texas, where it was back to programming BASIC, then RPG II, then IBM OS 360 assembler, and finally back to COBOL. By this time, I was bored with writing the same rudimentary report-generating programs every semester in a different language. Couple that with the fact that circumstances forced me to get a full-time job and school was out of the picture for a while, barring sporadic community college classes as I continued to pursue my education.

After another round of unfortunate circumstances, I wound up enlisting in the Army and shipping off to Hanau, Germany as a Bridge Crewman for an assault float bridge company. Like most military units, our administrative staff was short adequate headcount, so, when our platoon was asked for a volunteer to be personnel clerk, two of us raised our hands. When the First Sergeant asked, “Can either of you type?”, I answered “No, but I can work a computer.”, and I was the personnel clerk.

One of my initial frustrations was trying to keep leadership up to date with staffing levels as soldiers were transferring in and out almost daily and we only got weekly updates from the mainframe. So, to stay accurate, I created my own PC-based database application to track our people. However, since this was the late 80’s and early 90’s and networking was pretty much non-existent, keeping systems in synch was a constant exercise in swivel-chair integration - taking the disk downloads and printouts and then hand-jamming the updates. By my next assignment at Fort Irwin, California, I had reclassified as a Personnel Information Systems Management Specialist, and had moved up to running floppy disks across base to help update various unconnected systems.

My Army career culminated in being assigned to the Field Assistance Contact Team - SIDPERS, the global help desk supporting the old Army personnel system. This assignment inadvertently changed the trajectory of my life. First, I picked up an array of new skills, including SQL and Unix administration among others, most of which are now obsolete. Second, I was forced to obtain a Top Secret security clearance because my team was also on the on-call duty roster for the Army Emergency Operations Center. Luckily for me, every time my name came up for on-call, I was on temporary assignment somewhere else. Such is life, sometimes.

Between a year and a half of Unix and a top secret clearance, by the time I left the Army I had a job lined up programming HTML interfaces in a language I had never heard of (Perl), which fronted an Oracle database running on an HP-UX server. This was the dawn of the internet, so we created our own libraries to dynamically generate HTML pages based on hash-table data and and the user’s permissions. There were no HTTP libraries, so it was a series of PRINT statements for the headers, a blank line, and then the response body. But I wasn’t just programming; we were a team of three, and I was doing everything from gathering and documenting requirements, designing and creating databases, and managing Oracle, to swapping out hardware and updating firmware. Back then, you really had to understand a lot more about how things worked, especially in a very small shop.

Moving on, my next job was working for a large, privately held consulting firm where I was hired for a project that didn’t pan out. The Army was setting up a cybersecurity unit conveniently located for an easy commute, and this company had the “inside track” on the contract. I would just have to “temporarily” work an hour away until the contract was awarded. Spoiler: it was awarded to a competitor.

This was the late 90’s and “electronic commerce” was the big buzzword. So, after a few “learn a new skill, deliver the project and leave” consulting engagements, I was assigned to run the E-Commerce Center of Excellence. By this time, XML standards were gaining steam, B2B was all the rage, and I was asked to evaluate the software from a new company called webMethods. TBH, I was totally unimpressed with the B2B Integration Server 1.0.2 (the first production release) - it was basically a toy in my mind, because it lacked any way to implement programming logic. Yet, I still leveraged it to earn some extra money as an independent webMethods consultant at night.

During this time, I also completed my Bachelor of Science in Computer Studies, a very flexible degree program that allowed me to take a wide variety of courses and have them count toward my major. So, intent on maintaining employability, I focused on three main areas: databases, networking, and Java programming. My thinking was simple: you need to store your data, you need to connect to your data, and Java was rapidly becoming the go-to language for portability (anyone remember write once, debug everywhere?).

By December of 1999, I had grown tired of constantly having to learn new project-specific skills and yearned for a job where I could leverage my diverse IT experiences and knowledge. Meanwhile, our training credits with webMethods were about to expire, so I was sent to version 3.0 upgrade training. At this point, I had about 18 months of experience with the B2B Integration Server, and so I was very comfortable with the UI. Meanwhile, webMethods had grown from 23 people, when I first discovered them, to over 300 in a year and a half. Their explosive growth, combined with the introduction of Flow Services for business logic, immediately caught my attention.

During the training, I found myself sitting between two guys named Mike (if you are reading, you know who you are) and helping them navigate the Developer UI, being the one with experience. On day 2, I believe, Mike on my right said, “You should join us.” Dissatisfied with my current situation, I went out to my car at the next break and retrieved my resume. The next day, I received a call from a recruiter named Mike (seriously) who scheduled my interview with a couple of consultants and the Vice President of Professional Services, Mike(!).

I will always remember VP Mike’s last two interview questions. First he asked me to verify that, yes, I was working two jobs and using webMethods at both of them. His next question was about salary expectations. When he asked if I had any questions, I asked only one, “Do I have to change my name to Mike to work here?” (I did not.)

Thus, on January 12, 2000, webMethodMan was born. Finally, I had found my niche - a place where all of my various previously gained skills and experiences suddenly became my biggest strength. Since that day, webMethods has taken me to over twenty different countries where I’ve worked with hundreds of customers across industries. Now, with the move to IBM, I’m excited to watch the future of webMethods and integration unfold.

Viva, webMethods!

#webMethods #integration #ibm