I'm Sean McBride, a military veteran turned Software Engineer.
I code with Honor, defend the Just, and pursue lofty undertakings on the Cutting Edge
In his classic software engineering essay, No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argues that software complexity can be broken into two types. The first is essential complexity emergent from the problem…
Looking back at POSIX When it comes to software, standards are an important tool to protect against “lock-in.” Back in the day, this was accepted as common knowledge. Academics (ACM, IEEE), industry…
A burned out brick building It’s getting popular to discuss burnout, which is great! It’s a conversation we need to have to counteract the self-promotional hustleporn that over-emphasize unhealthy…
I am not a long-time Io enthusiast. I'm just a polyglot developer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves' travel guide…
A bust of Marcus Aurelius Ancient Rome has always fascinated me. On the one hand, it created the most professional pre-modern military and conquered much of the known world. On the other hand, it…
Recently, my friend Kait Moreno and I have started a YouTube video series to follow our progress as we go through The Rust Programming Language. If you haven't seen this yet, please consider clicking…
As I've gotten older and gained perspective on my life, I've concluded that many aspects of my personality and career have been broadly shaped by the era, location, and community of my childhood. In…
I am not a professional mainframe developer. I'm just a polyglot programmer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves…
I am not a Rubyist. I'm just a polyglot developer backpacking across different language ecosystems with a sense of curiosity and the software equivalent of a Rick Steves' travel guide: Bruce A. Tate’s…
A key assumption behind my decision to go back to grad school was that I would be free to engage in passion projects and creative coding. Alas, phrases like "that does not sufficiently advance the…
Some species of sharks need to stay in motion to stay alive If oxygen-rich water is not flowing across their gills, they cannot breathe Thus it is for many species of software engineers If dopamine…
A 33-year-old __(A)__ walks into a computer science program and __(B)__ A: Programmer. Intellectual Lightweight. Impostor. F***. Wannabe. B: Embarrasses himself. Fails out. F***s it up. Makes the most…
According to the WSJ, (HQ2)/2 is moving to Crystal City! For those of you not taking the GREs today, that means half of HQ2 is coming to the DMV and the other half is going to Long Island in Long…
All good things come to an end, and with Grey Matter Dashboard at 2.0, I've decided that it's now a appropriate time for me to pass the baton and move on from Decipher. It was an honor to be a part of…
On Wednesday, October 17th, Operation Code DC gathered for our second meetup since the relaunch of our chapter. We were hosted by GE Aviation in downtown Washington, DC. The GE Aviation staff went…
On August 28th, 2018, about 28 military, veterans, military spouses, and civilian allies gathered at Capitol Post to relaunch Operation Code's DC chapter. I think that's a pretty great turnout for a…
This past weekend, I finally made it through ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney. After originally purchasing this book from Audible in 2012, I quickly…
As I've gotten older and gained perspective on my life, I've concluded that many aspects of my personality and career have been broadly shaped by the era, location, and community of my childhood. In…
After a decade of career compromises, I'm finally following my passions Ideally, when someone graduates from college, they should understand their interests and aspirations and map that to a career…
Earlier today, I was pleased to discover that FedEx had shipped me an important package. No, this wasn't Christmas a week early (...or was it???). It was the brand-new Pixel phone and Daydream VR set…
Sirens Come this way, honored Odysseus... and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship until he has listened to the…
Why this reference? After the first week of my junior phase at Fullstack Academy, it's clear to me that Regular Expressions is a concept that I need to master quickly. In the past, I've usually…
Yesterday, some of my colleagues in Operation Code's Slack channel were expressing some concerns about outsourcing and the impact that this might have on their careers. Given all of the election…
One hundred years ago today, General Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, a man known for strong Christian beliefs and eccentric spiritualism (supposedly he had spoken with Napoleon…
T.P.P., how can I explain it I'll take it frame by frame it To have y'all all jumping, shouting, saying it T is for Trans, P is for Pacific, scratch your temple The last P, well that's not that simple…
First things first, there have been some setbacks with my Princess House Research. Nothing tragic, but a bit frustrating for me personally. Let me set the stage for you so that you can empathize…
In my last post, I discussed some of my initial thoughts about where my house was actually located between when it was built circa 1850 and when it was moved to the "Uptown" neighborhood of Alexandria…
In Chapter 1 of the Princess House Mysteries, I discovered that my new home at 1204 Princess Street wasn't built in 1920 like I had originally thought, but that it was built around 1850 and moved to…
Shortly before Christmas of 2014, my wife and I purchased a lovely townhouse in Alexandria City's Parker Gray Historic District. More specifically, we purchased a house on Princess Street, which my…
It's hard to believe that I've gone sixteen years without seeing it, but thanks to HBO Go and this wonderful blog post, I just wrapped up watching Wes Anderson's first commercial success: Rushmore…
One of the largest impacts of the demographic shift from Baby Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials has been the shift in preferences from the single-family homes, privacy, and quality of life offered by…
It's a tough time to be an US-based technology multinational in China. Sure, there's always been the risk of intellectual property theft and concerns about local copycat companies popping up overnight…
With over 90 million customers in over 60 countries, MetLife is one of the world's largest insurance companies. They are also one of the best examples of a Fortune 500 company combining mainframe and…
I want my 360 This post was originally hosted on the Millennial Mainframer blog
On April 7, 1964, Tom Watson Jr. stood at the front of a conference room in IBM's Poughkeepsie, NY research lab. Looking beyond the podium and out into the audience, Watson saw two hundred influential…
A few months ago, IBM slapped me on the wrist. No, this wasn’t really physical punishment or like hazing like at the Military Academy. Rather, it was a Notes Inbox slap named Action Required: Hercules…
Once the plebes burst through the door, the upperclassman’s roommate attacked up from our right flank. This disoriented the biggest plebes leading the charge, and forced me to assume point and…
In discussions on efforts to combat the impending mainframe skills shortage, programs such as the IBM Academic Initiative and the Master the Mainframe Contest typically play center stage. The…
This post was originally hosted on the Millennial Mainframer blog
Mac 3270? Water and Vinegar? How Mainframers began to use Macs It may seem strange to think that users, application developers, and systems programmers of IBM mainframes may use a Mac 3270 solution…
This is the second installment of our five-part series on efforts to inspire, educate, and train millennials towards gainful employment in mainframe positions, such as systems programming and…
For the past two years, Millennial Mainframer has sought to provide a “fresh perspective on all things mainframe.” Nearly all of this “fresh perspective” has come from young millennials working in…
So the mainframe blogosphere has already written up and down about the new zBC12 mainframe that IBM announced yesterday. Big woopdie do. So what that it’s harder, better, faster, stronger? Most…
Thanks to organizations such as Code for America, the techie community is increasingly starting to think about ways to leverage their engineering skills in volunteer public service projects. I…
Many of you know that I've had already had a handful of careers during my 27.5 years of life. Besides working in technology and serving in the Army, there was a brief period when I was a History PhD…
My personal blog has been relatively stale over the past few years. Partially that has had to do with being so busy working at IBM and completing my graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of…
I am often surprised by how quickly time can fly by. At the beginning of this year, I was an IBM System z Client Architect based out of Chicago. Despite the day-to-day stress of being in a demanding…
This post was originally hosted on the Millennial Mainframer blog
This post was originally hosted on the Millennial Mainframer blog
If you’re a millennial like me, there is a significant chance that you saw the show “ReBoot” during your childhood. Due to it’s status as the first full-length cartoon to be fully computerized, this…
One of the more unique aspects of being a Millennial Mainframer is working on teams with coworkers far older than ourselves. While this generational gap impacts day-to-day life in a mainframe shop in…
In honor of our 1,000th hit, behold System Z's answer to Ruby on Rails: COBOL on Cogs! In all seriousness, the modern mainframe has come a long way towards embracing modern web technologies. Due to…
Check out Roger Kay's Forbes article “Kids See A Future In Mainframes.” Much like our discussion of Marist College, Roger writes about Dave Dischiave’s efforts at Syracuse University to train up new…
By the very nature of being young professionals in a specialized and mature technical community, most millennial mainframers face the constant challenge of skill acquisition and credentialing. While…
It is commonly understood in the mainframe community that many tech folks today do not understand the difference between a mainframe and a cluster of distributed servers. This is highly ironic given…
Despite derision as a dinosaur doomed to gradual extinction, a recent breakthrough in mainframe technology has the potential to transform the world of modern data centers. On July 22, 2010, IBM…
With IBM moving towards Cloud Computing and the zEnterprise turning into a “Cloud-in-a-box,” it is increasingly important to track developments in the public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space…
VMWare and Full Virtualization In the early days of distributed computing, many experts considered x86 virtualization near to impossible due to the complexity of the platform. In contrast to the…
Praise to God for his many blessings! I have so much to be thankful for. Firstly, I was able to survive my 15 credit hour semester at IIT with a pretty respectable GPA and a published paper. My…
It’s difficult to believe, but I am now working through Midterms week of my first of two semesters for my Masters of IT Management program. Glancing back at my blog, I see that my last post on…
As many of you know, I have been pretty hesitant to go back to school. It’s been nearly two years since I’ve had a traditional paycheck. This is not to imply that Georgetown University was not a lot…
The Chief Information Officer of the Federal Government recently released a new plant to shift the majority of government IT into the “cloud” in the near future. This means a decrease in local IT…
In order to give myself a constructive project to work on, I’ve recently been teaching myself Java. According to the TIOBE index, this programming language is currently the most popular language…
This morning was my Rite of Acceptance into the Roman Catholic church. For those unfamiliar with the process, Wikipedia provides a reasonable explanation of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults…
I am currently working through three career books. So You Majored in What? is more-or-less a guide for humanities majors trying to figure out how to make their interests and coursework (seem) relevant…
I thought that it would be a useful exercise to publish my thoughts as I work towards getting to know myself a bit better. I am a recently-married West Point graduate that was medically retired from…
"What the Academy stands for has always been my guide throughout my military career, and to have approached the high ideals of duty, honor, and service to country that are the real spirit of West…
During Cadet Basic Training, I benefited greatly from the leadership of my cadre members. They stimulated my development in many ways. By far, it was my second detail Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Mathis…
I was always fascinated by my grandfather’s collection of model tanks. They are, by far, the most striking items in his office, clearly showing his pride as a retired armor officer. All of the models…