Es freut mich sehr, euch Martin Trübner, unseren Gastblogger, vorzustellen

(That's enough German for today.)

Martin's blog entry will be published this week, but first I thought I would give you a little bit of information about him. 


Martin is a freelance technical software developer, with deep system roots in z/VSE, and he has carried over his vast CICS applications knowledge over into z/OS. He has also written some software for Windows platforms. He was born in 1953 and met his first bit (an EBCDIC one) in 1972. He speaks German, English, HLASM, Cobol, PLI, REXX and some lesser known dialects like Pascal, BASIC, and Perl (which, if you didn't know, is really a town near the Luxembourgish/French/German border, located near Borg and Apach(e)). Before becoming a freelancer he worked for various shops including applications, central development, a vendor of system programs, and for a PCM (Plug-Compatible Manufacturer, a producer of hardware that supported the IBM System/370 and 390 architecture)


I met Martin during my days in Software AG R&D. I was a developer for Entire System Server, working on the two supported IBM platforms (the third being BS2000/OSD). I don't remember all the details, but I know VSE/ESA was involved. He and I became good friends, and we finally met when I travelled to Germany in 2003, and we got together again in 2005. (From that last visit, I seem to recall lots of good beer and yelling back in unison "Wir wissen!" at the GPS' repetitive "links fahren" as he drove me back to the hotel.)


Martin is one of a small group of fellow mainframe developers whose opinions and advice I wholeheartedly trust. I am glad he asked me if he could be a guest blogger, and as I stated in the title, es freut mich sehr.


Welcome aboard, Martin!


(Und vielen dank, Martin, for making my title more German-sounding. I was pretty close with the original, just a couple minor transgressions, like forgetting that vor- is a separable prefix, and the wrong case for "unser".)