Five years ago today: 6 August 2003, 9am. I turned up at main reception in IBM Hursley Park for my first day. I was excited, dressed far smarter than I have for work since, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to be doing. <\/p>\n
Five years later, today is the (official!) start of my new job in IBM, and a shift in my career: I’ve joined the “Emerging Technology Services” team.<\/p>\n
I tried to find a good description of ETS on the interwebs that I could link to, but not had any luck. I found a description on a few intranet pages, which I’ve managed to mangle below: <\/p>\n
Part of IBM Software Group’s Strategy and Technology Division, ETS focuses on emerging technologies and how they can be used to meet business needs. They work on customer problems to create innovative, bespoke technical solutions, which can include “architectural consultancy, technical solutions, demos, proof of concepts, pilot systems, and reference architectures” combining experience of working with customers with first-of-a-kind technologies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is my first job doing Services rather than product development. It’ll mean creating stuff with a specific customer in mind, rather than something to suit hundreds or thousands. From idea to delivery will be months for a proof of concept, rather than the year-or-two release cycles that I’m used to. <\/p>\n
It’s not my first job move internally. I’ve bounced around a bit over the last five years, mainly because of my magpie-like inability to focus on something for very long. <\/p>\n
WebSphere MQ (WMQ) was my first home, and I had a few different jobs in development for WMQ:<\/p>\n
job 1 – WMQ – Development – 10 months
\nMy first job was as a Java programmer developing new extensions for the admin interface for WMQ. <\/p>\njob 2 – WMQ – System Test – 21 months
\nWMQ is ‘middleware’ and it’s users are the applications which use it’s APIs. Testing meant designing and writing apps to test it’s APIs, with code like Perl and C, and learning the subtleties of some complex areas of WMQ. <\/p>\njob 3 – WMQ – “Level 3” Service – 13 months
\nThe Level 3 team provide advice, code fixes and support for the many corporate customers who use WebSphere MQ. I’d work with customers to diagnose problems, and develop fixes if problems were caused by our code. WMQ is a complex beast, with code in various languages like C, C++, and Java. The role meant diagnosing and fixing problems in all of these.<\/p>\n