Shane Poad

Learning is one of my key skills, followed closely by the ability to make that knowledge useful to others. Whether it is a new language, new tool, new protocol, or packaged software documentation that needs to be understood for purchasing decisions, ingesting information and then packaging that into something useful has been a very useful skill in this ever changing world of IT.

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Nearly my entire career has been spent in cost conscious environments, so using open source tools and building in-house tools has been a staple. Saying I know CL would be a gross understatement, having built several hundred CL commands for in house utilities to aid in both development and systems management. Starting all the way back in the early days of the System/38 release 1 around 1980, when we needed a way to view data base contents, because it wasn’t yet included in the OS, my DSPF command was born with text and hex output to the screen. This is back when SEU only had 6 lines of source displayed on the screen with column formatting for each line taking up the rest of the space, and there was no SDA yet. It was rough by modern comparison, and yet leaps and bounds better than where we just came from.

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EDUCATION

When I started school PCs hadn’t been invented yet and our programs were keyed onto punch cards after first being hand written on coding sheets. Attended Fox Valley Technical College in 1977 and learned RPG II and COBOL on an IBM S/360, and Basic on an IMSAI. Also attended Moraine Park Technical School a handful of years later to learn S/34. Picked up Data General AOS, IBM 1401 Autocoder, IBM System 3 OCL, IBM System 38 CPF, IBM AS/400, IBM i5/OS, and finally IBM i on the job and through professional education.

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LANGUAGES

I don’t claim to be an expert in all these languages. To make it onto this list at least one project had to be completed with it. They are listed in descending order of experience with it. RPG wins the prize with over 40 years and counting.

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IBM i (AS/400)

 

• RPG free, ILE RPG, RPG400, RPG III, RPG II

• CL

• PAL  4GL  (Paragon Application Language)

• SQL

• C

• COBOL

• Genesis V 4GL

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WEB / Frameworks

• HTML, Java Script, CSS, XML, JSON

• JQuery

• Bootstrap & Responsive

• Ext JS

• Adobe Action Script, FLEX
   

PC

• C

• VB.NET, VB6 & VB5, Basic

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S/3 & S/34

• RPG II

• OCL

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S/360 & S/370

• RPG II

• COBOL

• JCL

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WORK EXPERIENCE

Having only about 5 years of non-consulting positions in my 40+ years of experience, this could be a very long list.  To bring more important matters to the forefront, this will be a list of industries and applications where my time has been spent.

Law Enforcement & Public Safety – Designed, developed, documented, and supported packaged software to handle every facet starting from ingesting the 911 call data stream, to sending incident information to laptops in officers and fire fighters vehicles, to booking suspects in the jail, to adjudicating cases in municipal court.  This involves a large array of integrated modules and application support tools.

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Manufacturing / Discrete Processing - Worked with several packaged ERP systems including Lawson and Frontier building enhancements and extensions, and many home grown ERP systems which included design / build from the ground up.

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Publishing - Handled the acquisition and implementation of enterprise accounting software modules and BI reporting system.  Designed, developed, and implemented a publishing centric ERP system for managing their business in  an automated fashion.

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Insurance - Developed a first of its kind (it was 40 years ago and running on a System/3 and predates indexes) phonetic customer search system spanning about a dozen disparate lines of business.  Constructed several lines of business management software modules covering Health, AD&D, and Life insurance.  Designed and built a jewelry insurance system to automate the processing of notifications, billing, claims, etc.  Managed and planned the migration/conversion of a company onto the System/38 which of course had the first commercially available relational database.
 
Application Development Tools – Design, developed, documented, and supported various major application support tools.  This includes an end user query capable of producing multilevel summary reports with pivot tables.  Object oriented database driven application menu system that provided various environments to the end user (eg, Production, Training, Staging, etc.)  It also supported recursive program calls, along with a long list of other features.  Online Help authoring tool that included the ability to write tutorials with animations and quizzes.  Various system management tools for history logs, job scheduler, journals, disk space management, etc.   PAL 4GL used to generate every program in the Law Enforcement application and to integrate usage of all other tools.  All the tools will be listed else where as this is a very long list.   Currently in the process of migrating all of the commercial tools to an open source model going by the name iOpenTool.

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