From COBOL to Ruby on Rails — my long strange trip
By: Penny Bentley
Tags: Coding, Codingbootcamp, Programming

How long have I been coding? 1985. Since 1985. Do I love it? Yes, actually. But here is the thing, to 99% of the population, coding is as lackluster as the plumbing and electrical they depend on in their homes. Just as nobody cares what’s in their walls or under their sinks, no one really cares about what makes the internet go. What they want is a fast and easy way to navigate and find the information they need or buy the things they want. They depend on the safety and security that coding provides.

So what can I say about coding?I like knowing how the internet’s plumbing works. I enjoy seeing seeing my letters and numbers become lovely, beautiful web pages. Over the next several months I look forward to learning and growing.

As I said, I’ve been “coding”, or “programming”, or being a “developer” for a few decades now. Yes, decades. Technology has been good to me. While in the past my work has been mainly focused on the back end; making sure the books balance, the check prints, the files got uploaded to the IRS, etc. Now, I look forward to focusing on the front end. Thinking about usability and how a page can tell a user what they need without the user needing hours and hours of training.

Anyway, back to my little story. It was back in 1985 (yes that would be so last century) that I took my four year bachelors degree in marketing (which had landed me a basic retail job with low pay and awful hours) and embarked on a six month course on how to program. That’s what it was called back then — programming. This little course, which actually cost as much as my four year bachelors degree, taught me how to flow chart, code in basic, rpg, COBOL and assembler.

Assembler — that basic of all coding. Although I never used it to make a living and would be hard pressed to even recognize it now, it caught my imagination. Writing code at the level where one could play with bits and bytes was fascinating.

But COBOL was my entry into the world of information technology. I landed my first job at a large Chicago downtown bank (one of the many employers/clients I have had that no longer exist, but I digress). At “The Bank” I was introduced to experiences in coding standards, teams, and the drudgery of running test after test. If I was disappointed in my chosen career it was the realization that much of a programmers life has very little to do with programming. I spent much of my time tweaking other peoples code, maintaining test environments and documentation.

Sidenote: before there personal computers and word processing software, there was the word processing area. One would write up documents by hand. The hand written papers would be sent to the word processing area to be input. A triple spaced document would be returned to the author a day or so later. The author would make corrections and send it back. This cycle would continue until the document was complete and correct. Every development area in those days had bookshelves full of documentation. Documentation that was out of date almost immediately, of course.

No, I’m not going to talk about punch cards. I missed that era. Barely.

My time as a mainframe COBOL programmer was relatively short. COBOL was my first coding language and every language I’ve learned since has been compared to it. It’s my template.

But I escaped the mainframe. At the time I felt everything that could be done on the mainframe in COBOL had been done and I wanted to be more leading (or do you say bleeding) edge. An opportunity came up to implement a non-mainframe application and I jumped at it. I didn’t really learn a new cutting edge language but I was introduced to a tool that allowed the creation of pages that were used to gather information that could be reported on and printed onto legal documents. I also learned about modems and the transferring of information. The internet didn’t exist yet, modems and phone lines were used to transfer files from remote offices to the main office.

This non-mainframe work eventually led to PeopleSoft, which has ended up taking up the bulk of my career so far. PeopleSoft is a package software that supports all sorts of back end operations for corporations. As indicated by it’s name, it started as a human resources application but also offers applications for finance, supply chain and manufacturing as well. My area of focus is finance and supply chain. Much like that first non-mainframe software, it comes with tools to create tables, pages, processes and reports.

So, here I am, after 20+ years of PeopleSoft consulting, ready to take on another career shift. I relish the opportunity to learn Html, CSS and Ruby on Rails.

Stay tuned…