There are two people who influenced me to set my foot in systems integration and administration.

During the summer of 1992 while attending U.C. Berkeley, I took an awk programmer position at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. What I was doing was to write a long string of awk commands and wait at least for a couple of hours to see the result. At first it seemed OK, but soon I got bored working only with awk command. Within a week, I decided to quit and notified the manager I would quit.

The manager told me to stay just longer as it was extremely difficult to find proficient awk programmer (like me ;-) ), and as the paying was decent for the summer job for a student, I told her I would stay just for a month. She was willing to lend me some system administration books and allocated an extra workstation for me to play it around.

At first, I was hesitant to learn on system administration, but she kept encouraging me to take on the subject as it would broaden my technical knowledge and career opportunity.

As I had been a software developer for 10 years before that point, it was easy for me to go over systems administration manuals. At first, I read it just out of boredom, but soon found interests in it.

As for software development, I worked on microscopic details, but for systems integration and administration, I found macroscopic details were needed. It was a new experience for me and I started to take the subject seriously. As I felt comfortable with the UNIX computing environments as I had used UNIX for 10 years until that point, filling just small gap in systems engineering was easy.

To lend more books from my manager, I worked there until the end of summer for three months. During that time, I took a project on setting and managing servers remotely, and I was introduced and set a foot in systems architecting, integration and administration successfully.

Now I even forgot her name which is a shame to me, but her willingness, kindness and insight to lend me systems administration books and encouragment on taking new subject, changed my career substantially since then and I'm still into it.

Significant change in life came unexpectedly by a person whom I didn't expect to get it from, and I really appreciate her persistence and encouragement.

I think she did so just to hold a student worker who was willing to stay longer and I don't think she was technical enough to know all those subjects, but her recommendation was persuasive enough for me to take on the new subject.

The second person I should not forget is the one who tried to hire me as a SQL programmer.

After three-month long stint at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and fall semester of 1992 started, I looked for a system administration position to try out my newly learned technology, and was hired by Ingres in Alameda, California. But within a week I joined them as a part time consulting engineer, Ingres decided to dissolve the division I belonged to, and I had to look for a new position, and was contacted by a president of one of the vendors to Ingres.

Only what I can remember is one of his name was Gupta as he had long name, and he encouraged me to take on SQL programming as my experience covered computational mathematics.

I was not interested in Database and SQL programming at all until then, but he was quite persistent on taking me the subject. I didn't like his attitudes at all at that time, so I decided not to take the position at his company. He was dissappointed and recommended me some reading lists for me to take on and suggested me to contact him later on if I changed my mind on it.

From that point on, I took many short-term consulting projects while in school. As I had a flexible schedule and was looking for a new subject, I decided to take on SQL programming as a side, and it was far more challenging than I expected. I went over the lists Gupta recommended and with the mixture of previous ten years of software developing experience, I could master the database and SQL pretty quickly.

Getting a consulting project became much easier from that point on, as my experience covered wide range of subjects. After DB and SQL programming, I started using commercial DB packages such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres, MS SQL server and My SQL, which became a basis of my present career track.

I hesitantly took the new subject, but those two people I mentioned were persistent on encouraging me taking new subject, saying I was fit for that. It's worth listening to the advice of right people, and I'm ashamed of forgetting their names and contact numbers.

(May 28, 1999)

Reading this again refreshed my memory on those two people and those days which was like happened just a couple of years ago.

Up until 2000, I worked quite frequently and extensively as an Oracle or Database Administrator or Database programmer for a large infrastructure of the system and had a pretty solid and homogenous career track.

But for the last several years, I've been working on projects of the diverse and heterogeneous nature, although working on Oracle and Database architecting, integration and administration is still a significant portion of it, sometimes it's not all of it.

It's for sure that working on Database architecting and SQL programming helped me to set a foot in systems integration and administration solidly.

(November 27, 2006)

Copyright© 1999-2006 Daniel SW Kim