What is it, exactly, that I do?

An aquaintance recently asked me that question, and for the umpteenth time, I realized that I didn't have an easy answer.

In the old days, I was called a programmer - then a programmer / analyst - then programmer / systems analyst. Now, programmers are "engineers."

So now I'm a "Senior Software Engineer": development team lead and manager for the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) portion of Sun Microsystem's Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Got that?

Here's the kind of stuff I look at while at work...

Gobbledeygook

I spend my days getting mainframes to talk to application servers to talk to clients, in both directions. This is J2EE, TCP/IP socket programming in Java, Cobol, C/C++, and mainframe Assembler language, with resource adapters, connection pooling, subscribe/publish messaging - requiring additional knowledge in IBM mainframe Cobol, TSO, JCL, CICS, IMS/DB, IMS/TM, DB2, Oracle, and their associated interfaces: CICS Transaction Gateway, IMS Connect, IMS Connector for Java.

None of this has anything to do with electronics or hardware. It’s all computer programming. Nothing that I program will last more than a few years, and none of the above terms and acronyms will mean anything to even the most technical of my grandchildren.

It sure would be nice to get into doing something more lasting, and of more help to the world.