Wiserve.com is the blog of Keith Wilson. I have been a software developer for more than 25 years, working on a variety of environments. I started professionally with IBM/MVS and VM/OS mainframe systems programming in BAL and COBOL. I did that for about 10 years and enjoyed it immensely. There was a point where I think I knew all of the OS/360 opcodes and could write BAL code in my sleep. Those were the days when you really believed you knew all of the details and intricacies of the system. And, if you didn’t know it you could look it up – there were books for that.
I got my first exposure to the new IBM PCs in about 1986 when I was asked to convert an application from a mini-computer (I don’t remember which one) to a PC using dBASE III for a major rental car company in my spare time. I learned so much and could see this was a whole new world that would expand a lot. I learned dBASE and converted in the app in just a few weeks, but spent several months rewriting and tuning it when performance turned out to be attrocious. Mainframes were still looking really good in those days. I got my first look at Clipper at that time.
In 1994 or so I made the move from mainframes to PCs when I learned C and began to develop a Windows application that would work with the mainframe app that I had been developing and supporting for about 5 years. That turned out to be the end of my mainframe career (so far).
I did a couple of years of Powerbuilder, the less said the better about that, before going back to Windows and developing a serious client-server application in MFC/C++. We got that application developed and released about the time that everyone decided they wanted web apps.
So, in 1999 or 2000 I began to develop web applications. I have worked with classic ASP, Javascript, ASP.NET, C++, C#, SQL Server, Oracle, PHP, mySQL, Perl, and other assorted languages and environments continuously since that time.
It has been an interesting ride, and this blog is my attempt to capture some of the lessons I have learned and chronicle my efforts to keep improving my skills and my desire to move ahead into the future – whatever that is – of software development.
If you would like to see my resume, click here. If you are looking for my long-standing wiserve.com page, then you should have clicked the previous link.