From Technophobe to COBOL Queen - Chapter 4

I can clearly remember where I was in December last year. As a bartender in the festive period I was swept off my feet for the entire month - needless to say, my step tracker was kept very happy. This year I've been keeping busy but in a very different way - I've swapped the 3am finishes for 8am starts and instead of making drinks I'm making virtual machines. All while being seranaded by the lovely Mariah Carey's Christmas classic, of course.

But, I'm sure you didn't come here for me to get Christmas songs stuck in your head - so let's talk tech.

Let me tell you about the most interesting project I came across this month. Whether you lived through it or not, I'm sure we are all familiar with the Y2K crisis - towards the end of the 20th Century, computer programmers realised that when the year '00' was entered in their systems, the computer may interpret it as the year 1900 rather than 2000. Companies worldwide were faced with the difficult task of modifying their code to tackle this issue, and many took different approaches. This leads me to some code I found, written in the 1980's. Their approach was the following: (note it has been modified to ensure anonymity)

So, what does this mean? Well to read this code you must firstly understand that COBOL works by reading through paragraphs - hence 'Paragraph-1' in green at the top. The next line asks the user to enter the two-digit year into the 'Year-Entered' field, for example '20' for the year 2020. Now, this is where it gets interesting: the next two lines say 'if the two-digit year entered is greater than 20 and less than 90, ask the user to ask the date again' and the cycle continues. That means if the user were to enter '21' for the year 2021 the program would ask them to enter it again, on an infinite loop. As you can imagine, this would make using the application after 2020 impossible! I found this project particularly fascinating because it is yet another example of how COBOL has stood the test of time.

Since joining the presales team in August, I've heard all about the world of Linux, virtual machines and command-line interface. This month I decided to get to grips with all three at once and installed Red Hat Linux on a virtual machine, and (with a lot of heavy Googling) even fired up an application using command prompts. I definitely need to spend more time playing about with it as it is still all very alien to me, but at this stage I'm happy enough with just dipping my toe into this new world.

With all the stress that 2020 has thrown at us, I am now more than ever aware of how important taking time out of your day to unwind is! With this in mind, I teamed up with Amanda Daudaraviciute and the Micro Focus SHINE team to see how we could promote mindfulness throughout the Belfast office. After weeks of preparation, we were ready to give it a trial run, and held our first lunchtime meditation session with our friends from the Graduate Sales Team. It was a huge success (if I do say so myself) and left us all feeling very zen. As it was the first time I had ever tried meditation I found it hard to concentrate at first but I can't wait to improve and I'm looking forward to rolling it out to the rest of the office in the new year!

So what are my plans for the next month? Well, after a crazy year I think it's fair to say I will be taking some well-deserved time off. I'm looking forward to a cosy Christmas with my family and dressing my dog up as a reindeer. In the new year, I would love to become more confident using command-line interface. The aim is to be able to use a few simple commands without having to rely on Google so much!

I hope everyone has a great time over the festive period and I look forward to seeing you all again in the new year - here's to 2021! In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter - I always enjoy interacting with you all.