We Have Residents!

(Originally posted 2013-07-18.)

Back in May I wrote about a new batch residency planned for this October and invited good people to apply to join the team. It’s been very pleasing how many people applied to be residents and the high quality of the entrants: It was genuinely difficult to pick the eventual team. We also had to reduce the scope a bit – which was a disappointment to both Frank Kyne and I. So, if you didn’t get selected I’d encourage you to apply for other residencies as they come up.

So here’s the final team:

• Karen Wilkins – DB2 and COBOL.
• Dean Harrison – Tivoli Workload Scheduler, JCL and Operational Considerations in general.
• Myself – orchestrating and doing the Performance piece, and probably playing with some XML or JSON.

You’ll notice we lost PL/I and VSAM. I’m hoping to sneak some VSAM in – and definitely some Sequential Data Set processing. You might disagree but the loss of PL/I is less severe to me than not dealing with VSAM issues.

Though the residency starts 7 October the next phase is putting some materials together for us to work from and finalising our (large) sample data and the environment we’ll run on. I’m also hoping to have access to our (z/OS 2.1) system so I can try out the idea that you can process SMF data with REXX, and maybe a few other things. You’ll appreciate, though, that the “day job” intervenes quite often. 🙂

We hope to make this quite a “social” residency – so some blog posts and tweets will come out. Stay tuned! And you might want to follow us on twitter: Karen, Dean and myself.

We also are pencilled in to present some of the material at GSE Annual Conference just a few days after the residency finishes in early November – which will be a challenging deadline. With luck I’ll get to present a more polished version at the UKCMG One Day Conference in late November. But I’m not on the agenda yet.

Stay tuned!