Hello, from Brian

Hello everyone! Since this is my introductory post to this blog, I think it is more appropriate that I say Hello World! Almost every programmer has gone through the experience of creating their first ‘Hello World’ application, and I suppose that attempting to post a first blog entry is similar. In both cases a person needs to become familiar with a language, and one or more creative tools to produce some usable output, resulting in instant gratification. Yeah!

I’ve decided to participate in this blog in order to share and discuss things that I am interested in and currently focused on, which could mean many different topics. In doing so, I hope to spark some interest and expand the horizons of you, the reader. Having just looked at my career history, I rather scared myself. It’s like a precursor to experiencing your entire life flashing before your eyes. Here’s a little synopsis; hope its not too scary to read.

Way back in ‘78, I was hired as a test engineer when our facility was manufacturing 5250 display terminals, keyboards and other related equipment. Its probably just weird fate that I was associated with System i heritage back then, as I am associated with the current incarnation.

I was hired because I knew the timing sequence of the Intel 8080 microprocessor with its minimalist instruction set, which a person could code in hexadecimal by recalling its opcodes. I was around when the company made the decision to use the Intel 8088 in the first IBM PC instead of the Motorola 68000. This was a cost/quality/availability decision which made our programming lives yucky for many years, since we had to worry about 64k segment boundaries. Around ‘85 I moved from manufacturing to the software development lab to help out on the IBM ImagEdit product. Development was done on PC XTs with 10 Meg hard drives. I took over the development of a locally created windowing system for DOS and created DOS versions of scroll bars, title bars and multiple windows that the Mac already had. Our 1 bit per pixel editor needed to work in 512k bytes of RAM, so we had to place all of our code in overlays that could be swapped out when other functions were required. I’ve been doing graphical user interface work ever since, for applications that run on Windows 2.0, OS/2, Windows 3.1, and so on up to today’s Eclipse environment.

Due to my user interface expertise, I was invited in ‘92 to become a part of the VisualAge RPG development team to design and lead the development of its UI runtime. In ‘97, I became an early adopter of the new Java language and ported the UI runtime to support RPG based Java Swing applications and RPG based browser Applets. Convincing IBM to ship the port was a job in itself, since Java was so new. I did stints in ‘98 with VisualAge for Java, and participated in the birth of Eclipse in ‘99 before rejoining the iSeries team in ‘01.

My Eclipse skills allowed me to design and write the initial Eclipse Lpex based RPG, DDS and CL editors from the original C++ based code and supplemented it by creating the iSeries Source Prompter view. Recently, I led a tiny team to combine some existing models and frameworks to create the Screen Designer Technology Preview.

As you have probably surmised, my primary expertise is with graphical user interfaces and human computer interaction, in particular, rich client user interfaces and architectures.

Don’t you wish all babies are this succinct when they greet the world? Thanks for reading, and I hope you come by to say ‘hi’!