This is the last post for the last class that I will take in this program. Hurray!! How does it feel to be almost done? Honestly, I am more tired than anything else at this point. However, I have to admit that I do wonder if anyone actually reads the content of these posts, after the first one, or if the grader is just checking that something was submitted. I was tempted to just copy and paste ipsum lorem to see if it would pass, but decided that was not the way I want to go out.

How do I want to go out? Well, I’d like to start by saying thank you to all the professors and TAs. I also would like thank my family that has been neglected at times when I have been consumed by a class. I also need to thank all the people who post to Stack overflow and other such sites, and also the people who click on the answer that is actually an answer that works. Thanks to all the people who post great videos.

I am not exactly sure what this degree will mean for me. Perhaps, a new career; perhaps just a very expensive and extremely time consuming hobby. Either way, I am happy. I have enjoyed the classes (maybe not every single one). I look forward to having free time again. I am not sure what I am going to do with all that free time. One thing for sure is that I will go back to playing badminton regularly. I love badminton. There are actually a lot of programmers who play in my club.

I have to admit that I do prefer in person learning. Of course, I could not have completed this degree any other way than through eCampus.

Peace.

The end of this course and program is getting near. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I will do after graduation.

This Capstone project has taken up a huge amount of time. I understand that this is my fault and my team’s fault. We are going far beyond what the client asked for. I only mention this, because if I was in a situation where I needed to be actively looking for a job, I would have had very little time for my job search.

Fortunately, I have a job. I have attended several job fairs and spoken with potential employers and have come to the conclusion that I have a really good job right now. I just don’t like my management. “Bad management is endemic” — these words were spoken by none other than Benjamin Brewster, and I am thankful for them, because he is absolutely right. Even if I were to find a new job with great management, I realize there is no guarantee that the situation would continue. Then I began to think of all of the things that I would lose if I left (retired from) my current employment. I have five weeks of vacation and could never go back to two. I have a lot of autonomy in how I get my work done. I can actually just ignore management for the most part as long as I get my work done. Money is not an issue for me.

At this point, I think I am going to stay where I am and hopefully try to use my newly acquired computer science knowledge working for my current employer. It’s easier said than done, but has gone from being impossible to only improbable. I can handle those odds.

What on earth could this be? It is the 5 year IT Modernization happening at my employer. We are 4 years into this plan, and the only things being produced are undercooked turd-burgers.

For a number of very valid reasons, my agency is retiring its legacy IBM mainframes and moving to open source software based in the cloud. We have millions and millions of lines of code and this move is a huge, complicated undertaking. We have some really great software and also some crappy software. The trouble is the great software was written 15, 30, 40, and even 50 years ago and the crappy software is what is being written today.

We have our own onsite cloud. It sounds so cool. Unfortunately, it absolutely sucks. Forgive me for being a heretic, but I cringe every time a program is taken out of the mainframe and moved to a web-based version. The IT Department has sworn that they leading us to the promised land. All I see is desert. It’s not just me. All 40 of my coworkers in my office agree with this assessment. Employees use the software all day, everyday. Even our new twenty-something employees that we got from the Peace Corps prefer the old terminal programs over the hot, new crap.

Why? Speed and ease. It takes much more time to accomplish the same work using cloud based web programs as it did using the mainframe programs. The IT Department blamed bandwidth for performance problems for the last 15 years. As a result the managers gave them all the bandwidth they requested. So bandwidth is not a problem. The other issue is ease of use. Back in the old days, the agency trained many of it’s own programmers from recruiting from within. Those programmers had actually done some of the real work at some point. The old programs were written by someone trying to make the program easy for the user. The programmers of today have no relationship to the work, do not understand it, and write programs that are easy to program. The end result is more labor intensive software that is twice as slow (on a good day). The agency swears that there will be huge savings from the IT Modernization in what is spent on IT. However, we have 4,000 people working in IT and 56,000 users. Work got easier for 4,000 people and harder for 56,000. Fortunately, managers will never count how much labor the rest of the agency loses in order for IT to gain.

I must say that the managers have been very smart about this IT Modernization. They did not request special funding from Congress for this effort. Therefore, there is much less scrutiny of it. I think the managers learned a lesson from a $400 million project to move the various legacy systems that we share with all 50 states to a web-based system. The funding for it was gotten through a special request from Congress. The project was a complete failure — a la Cover Oregon. Congress was not happy. The president at the time nominated the person in charge of this failure to head our agency. The Senate refused to confirm the nomination. Lesson learned. So instead of getting a special appropriation from Congress, headquarters has been starving the rest of the agency of funds and staff in order to pay for IT Modernization, so far $863 million.

I apologize for this rant. I hope you have found it amusing. The best way for me to explain my situation is this: I have been driving a 1972 Ford Cobra and it is being taken away. I am being given a brand new Toyota Prius as a replacement. I want my Cobra back.

For my Capstone project I requested a business sponsored project. Luckily, I am on a team with two other very capable students. Our project is to take a prototype application from a Windows desktop application and move it to the cloud.

Unluckily, the sponsor has not been active in communicating with us. We had one live meeting in Teams where we were to decide if we wanted to have one team of six people or two teams of three, and we were given a short demonstration of the sponsor’s technology. We chose to have two teams of three. One team member sent the sponsor a detailed list of questions to which the sponsor responded, but that was it. That was on October 7. There has been no contact with the team since then from the sponsor, but we have been able to contact sponsor’s employees.

Once we got access to the sponsor’s codebase we got to work figuring out our respective roles in the project. Other than move the application to the could, we have not had much input about what exactly we are trying to accomplish. It seems to me that we are going well past the sponsor’s expectations. I have been spending way, way over 10 hours per week on this. Hopefully, this will decrease as we are now more familiar with the project. I enjoy a challenge and our project is challenging.

I entered this OSU’s eCampus Computer Science post-bac in the Winter of 2017, with the intention of retiring from my current job about the same time I graduate from the program and then getting a local IT job. (I took one class per term and took summer terms off — in case you are doing the math.) 2021 was the first year that I was eligible to retire under the early retirement rules, but the deadline for applying for retirement – September 30 – has come and gone. What happened?

COVID-19 — that’s what happened. Working from home was limited to one day every two weeks before COVID-19. We got a new head of our agency in 2018. About one or two months before COVID hit, he cancelled work from home entirely, but in March of 2019 the agency sent everybody to work from home (they just called it a different name than work from home which is still technically cancelled). Yet here I am still working form home. So how did this change my retirement outlook?

For starters, I began to like my work more since I no longer have to deal with the management. I actually like my work; it’s the management that is hard to tolerate. I really like not going in to the office except I do miss the cookies and doughnuts. I no longer have to pretend that I am not bored out of my mind during staff meetings — now I just leave my camera off and continue to do my work while the management drones on and on about how much they love us, other important agency happenings, blah, blah, blah.

However, the most important reason for not retiring is that what was impossible in the agency before COVID has become possible. That new possibility is the Information Technology Specialist positions can be out stationed. That means that an IT Specialist can work in their local office instead of moving to Seattle or Baltimore (have you ever been to Baltimore? – yuck). Moving was not an option for me.

So I have decided not to retire and to try to get an IT position within my agency. Actually, there is a lot I could contribute since I have real, in depth knowledge of the business processes. If it does not workout, I can always retire in 2022 or 2023. It’s nice to have choices.

A lot of my classes have have begun with the feeling that I am drinking from a firehose. The classes covered many topics and languages that were completely unfamiliar to me, and the content was rapidly spewed forth with assignments due in short time frames. I have to admit that it took a lot of adaptation to learn how to drink from the firehose without injury. I also have to admit that I did not enjoy learning to do this and would have much preferred some other way. In fact, there were times when I was not sure I was up to the task, but somehow I have always managed to make it through.

I think the ability to drink from a firehose is the most important thing that I have learned in my course of study at OSU. To me, drinking from a firehose is the ability to learn completely new things in a short time. It also means not trying to master a particular language or skill set, because those things are constantly changing. Drinking from a firehose means learning new languages and skills in short order and doing it on my own. This course has given me the confidence to know that I can pickup whatever new language, framework, model, etc. that is required.

As I begin the Capstone project, I can tell that I will need to do a lot of research and learn new skills, but this does not intimidate me. I know how to drink from a firehose.