I'm Sean McBride, a military veteran turned Software Engineer.
I code with Honor, defend the Just, and pursue lofty undertakings on the Cutting Edge
The federal government is rethinking OMB Circular A-76, which historically has treated engineering as "commercial activity" to be outsourced, including core custom software, fueling sole-source capture and contractor dependence. Based on recent comments from Scott Kupor at the Office of Personnel Management, OMB is…
Generative and agentic AI applied to mainframe COBOL modernization is one of the most underrated shifts in the software industry. It's been about a decade since I last worked with IBM mainframes, so I was excited to join IBM zDay 2025 and see what's new. COBOL Continues to Evolve COBOL, like C and C++, continues to…
I've heard LLMs brought up in the context of legacy code modernization. Here are some lessons learned I've had digging into using agentic coding techniques with Fixed Format COBOL on the Exercism COBOL track. My Approach When working through the track, I basically did the Easy difficulty problems by hand with LLMs…
Wanted to give an update since it's been about a month since I started casually exploring post-sabbatical job opportunities. Essentially, I've learned that I'm very picky, and the market is very light on opportunity. This is a rough combo! I've decided to pause the search, extend my sabbatical, and spend more time on…
I've come to believe that calling yourself a "systems programmer" or "systems hacker" is maladaptive for career planning. With rare exceptions, people in industry who write "systems code" are really specialists: avionics, automotive, audio, CUDA, Linux kernel, Windows drivers, games, CNO, endpoint, etc. Your economic…
After a pretty intense slog, I've made it through Coplien's Advanced C++ book from 1992. This has likely been the most difficult C++ book I've ever read, especially compared to some of the easy-breezy golden oldie books like "Ruminations on C++" I've been going through recently. I had to reread chapters and noodle on…
People complain about RAII, but at least you can look that acronym up. Sure, "Resource acquisition is initialization" might have the air of a really clever Danish witticism that got a bit mangled by Google Translate. However, compared to Dijkstra, who invented semaphores solely as a psyop to get us to use the words…
A few weeks ago, I committed the grave sin of confusing the Apple II and Commodore 64 floppy disk drives! Mea Culpa! As penance, I chose to read Michael Swaine's Fire in the Valley , an engaging history of the Personal Computing Revolution. Michael Swaine, longtime editor and columnist of Dr. Dobb's Journal , is a…
I'm taking some flak for having worked at CrowdStrike. It's understandable that folks feel this way. The outage was serious and historic. My wife's medical clinic couldn't access EMRs for a week. I asked to help her clinic, but she was worried about her coworkers knowing that I worked there. Many others suffered like…
Motivation American Programmers currently have a lot of anxiety about LLM-related job loss and a recent resurgence of job offshoring. In many ways, this environment is very similar to the early 1990s, when pundits argued that special CASE tools would generate source code from diagrams and the industry was worried…