I am 38 and I love what I do. Later in life will I still be developing? This may shock you but the mainframe gives me hope. Have you ever walked through a mainframe development department lately? Well I have, and I must tell you it’s grey. Yep, that’s right grey hair or if fate has been cruel to you no hair.

You might be asking why where you walking through a mainframe department. Well it’s a funny story. One day an architect on my team came over to my desk and said he needed me to help a team connect to one of our existing web services. That’s right; he walked me right into the mainframe developer’s lair. It was surreal. I am thinking to myself how do I get a dinosaur to drive a Prius? My architect introduced me to a gentleman that could have been old enough to be my grandfather and abruptly left.

After some awkward questions like, do you use SOAP? Can the mainframe understand XML? Do you have a SOAP client or are you going to submit xml blobs with replaced sections? I was amazed when they said “yes we use SOAP and have a client for the mainframe”, I thought of that Prius with a dinosaur driving down the street.

At my grandfather’s age will I still be coding? I hope so and now I have hope because of the mainframe and there developers. Live long enough and the world will surprise you. Here’s to the mainframe, long live the mainframe!