[Today’s run: rest day]
So in 1996 I answered an advertisement on the co.jobs newsgroup from a place called Intellistor in Longmont, CO. We did the interview thing, and they hired me.
Intellistor was a spin-off company from the “mother ship” operation of IBM between Longmont and Boulder, CO. Their product was disk and tape subsystems. At some time before my appearance on the scene they had found themselves in need of money and were bought by Fujitsu. While I was there it was a piece of Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA), based in California.
I was hired by the IT group and my title was Tools Engineer. It was my job to help acquire and maintain software development tools for the people doing firmware development. Up until this time I had not been around any firmware/hardware development and I enjoyed learning a bit about that.
One of the biggest pieces I managed was a home-grown source code control system built on top of RCS. I also built some CGI stuff for managing conference rooms and resources. I was the administrator of their internet news system. I also got involved in some simulation work. I also got to do some training in Java and did more with C++.
After I had been there about 18 months the economy in Japan started to have problems. Fujitsu then started to cut back on their US operations (I think they were trying to bring some jobs back to Japan in order to keep long term employees happy there.) FCPA/Intellistor then announced a reduction in force. Not too far into that process my boss, Russ Fellows, told me that IT was being reduced and my job was going away.
So, it was back to a job search. I answered an advertisement from Platte River Power Authority for an Oracle DBA. And, amazingly enough, I got that job. I don’t remember having done much with Oracle at Intellistor or ISU, but we did fool around with it quite a bit at UIS and some at SPSS.
PRPA was working with two municipal utilities to set up a CIS/Billing system. The software package had been selected, and the hardware platform had been selected. They needed someone to come in, do training on the software, do the installation and then maintain the thing. I was hired by Mike Dahl and interviewed with Jeannie Marshall (Longmont) and Curt Miller (Ft. Collins). I was the DBA and long-time PRPA employee Nancy Haskins was the systems administrator.
It took about two years to do the training and conversion of the old system and “go-live” with the SCT Banner CIS software. We were running Oracle v7 on HP-UX v10. Part of my job was to figure out how to meet our goals for reliability and disaster recovery. I went to a class about Oracle’s Advanced Replication feature, but that didn’t fit. So we with with a standby database configuration. Nancy worked on an internal PRPA project to build an off-site disaster recovery center. We put our standby systems there.
We also did bill printing at the beginning, about 10,000 sheets per day. I got to learn about printers and paper and jamming and humidity.
Any system like this has various inputs and outputs. For our system I ended up writing a lot of small scripts/programs in Perl using the Oracle DBI package to talk to the database. I wrote a much larger Perl package to do bill formatting (putting the data on the piece of paper). So there is a combination of programming, database administration and systems engineering work.
Nancy Haskins retired after the system had been live for a couple of years. We then hired Robyn Moore to work part time on system admin tasks and to learn something about the DBA parts to cover for me on vacations and such.
Since go-live, we have upgraded the SCT software a couple of times for each city. And we have gone from Oracle 7 to Oracle 10 and 11. The client-server configuration has been changed to a client — middleware — server configuration.
I have been at PRPA now for 15 years. In late 2009 I went to full-time telecommuting as my family and I moved from Colorado to Mississippi.