Monthly Archives: April 2018

The History Of (My) Coding – Part 5 Fantasy Cricket And Cowboys

After years of familiarity it can be a big step out into the unknown swimming with the sharks, but I needn’t have worried. The big wide world of contracting was not exactly a showcase for excellence… I marketed myself as a senior analyst programmer, with skills in COBOL, CICS, VSAM, Supra, and if push came […]

The History Of (My) Coding – Part 4 Fashion And Freelancers

  Eleven years is a long time to be in the same job. Could I perform as part of a team? Would my coding skills be up to scratch? And what was the beer like in Manchester? The last few weeks of my time at the brewery should have been a period of handover, but […]

The History Of (My) Coding – Part 3 COBOL, Cricket and a Copper

A few years into my IT career I ditched Assembler for COBOL and hoped that I would never have to go back… COBOL was a revelation. It was horse drawn carriage to motor car, Betamax to VHS, black and white to colour. After the relatively slow and long-winded Assembler, I could churn out COBOL code […]

The History Of (My) Coding – Part 2 The Punk Programmer

My forty year career in IT blossomed in the late 1970s as I learned a valuable lesson about continuous stationery and undertook my first legacy modernisation project… The seventies were drawing to a close and technology was moving at pace. Actually, if you compare it to technological developments today it wasn’t really moving that quickly. […]

Executing A Legacy Modernisation Project

Introduction Once upon a time your computer systems were cutting edge technology. Your IT department was a shining light of innovation and your staff were young and creative. Now your staff are older, wiser, more experienced, and they need to be because the resource pool to maintain and enhance your ageing technology diminishes by the […]