Also, those of you who think COBOL has been dead for decades- go ask your bank or government if they have COBOL jobs. :P

Congratulations, Veronica, for knowing what you want to do and for doing it! I look forward to seeing more of you on this excellent channel. My first job was coding in COBOL (in 1988). Since I'm close to retirement, I'm lucky that that I'm able to spend my remaining programming years looking after a legacy (trading) system. My organization's IT leaves me and my team alone provided that we meet security requirements. The stinky IT puppets don't get to waste my time with pointless meetings.

Curious... Did you report my previous comment about podcasting as spam or was that an automatic google thing or just some person in these comments? If I offended you somehow, it would be good to understand so I don't repeat. Thanks

Explaining tech/consulting is DEFINITELY going to be a good place to be, when it comes to job security, long term/as long as possible, with the rise of automation/AI/machines/robots, I honestly think, at some point, this is our future; An Automated-Post-Scarcity-Society; The Society im trying to define is one where AI/Robots/automation is involved,without any money involved,but ecological/certain materials/elements,would be hard to come by/limited, but everyones basic needs would be handled/met and MAYBE SLIGHTLY more than basic needs,if certain things are available and everyones basic needs are met for that month,certain other items might also be available,but everything would be done autonomously/automatically/without human intervention, mostly,other than,government,voting systems/congress,Mayors,governor's,presidents,regulating/regulation,consulting, ethical decision making/systems/optimizing the autonomous manufacturing and delivery systems/infrastructures,to make it better/also to mitigate/avoid/minimize harm,that comes from the over all system/unforseen/foreseen harm/analytics,to a degree/most AI systems are designed to be as efficient as possible/its not necessarily designed to look at certain things,an example of this would be,if someone killed off all of one animal,the animal that the extinct animal ate,could over populate, and in turn kill off another animal,because the animals food supply could become limited,due to over population,this is just one example of adverse effects that need to be found/prevented/mitigated; Also technological/ecological advancements would be valued/anything that betters the over all system,also all of these changes/improvements/advancements,creates new variables and COULD cause damage,so these type things also need to be analyzed, but most tasks/jobs would become completely autonomous.

​@@VeronicaExplainsGovernment/banks/businesses are DEFINITELY known for using old technology/old equipment/old software, even when their advised not to, for security reasons/practicality/because work loads are being slowed down, due to A LOT of factors, that shouldn't even have to be thought about nowadays/ since like 2010/2011/ like 11 or 12 years ago/using software/hardware from the 70s/80s just isn't practical, AT ALL, / newer/modern tech/software has become affordable nowadays, for basically anyone, but yes I know companies/businesses/banks/governments want to hang on to the past, I think if they could get away with it, they would use paper/filing cabinets/stamps/the pony express vs email/servers/networks/digital calendars and so on.

Wtf haha:) I like medieval clothing :)

I'm guessing you were financially secure due to your 35 years in IT in order to make that career switch. Lol

I just recently dodged a bullet with a job that looked really good on paper and that I was told flat out that I the top pick for by far - but the company axed the position days before they sent me the offer letter because upper management wanted to make their Q3 books look slightly better by not filling the position - a position I could tell just from the interview they desperately needed filled. The guy interviewing me was the only person doing the work and was extremely overloaded. It would have been a lot of fun, but given that the longest of my last 4 jobs were 1 year (they wanted me back in the office after telling me I wouldn't need to be in the office when I was hired - I resisted and they made up an excuse to fire me), 2 years (project was finished and was handed off to a team of maintainers that I had trained), 8 months (they hired me with the expectation that they could sell their services to clients and then couldn't, so I spent 75% of my time helping other people with their jobs instead of doing mine and they eventually realized they didn't have work for me and let me go) and 4 month (extremely bad fit), I'm very happy that they axed the position before I was hired and not 6 months down the line. Now I'm working for a university IT department, which is extremely nice. I started my career working for a university and I'm so glad to be doing so again - this time I'm even covered by a union. I'm even getting paid better than I would have been at the job that fell through, and this is 100% linux/unix rather than 75%/25% Linux/Windows. It's only been a couple months and I'm mostly liking where I am - my only complaint is that they hired me at an awkward time and there's not a lot for me to do - due to vacations and such, the big projects I'll be working on are delayed and waiting on other teams - so I've had a handful of pretty small/trivial tasks. Oh, and the fucking macbook they gave me. I somehow managed to be a (mostly) Linux admin for a decade and avoid macs entirely until now and I can not stand that thing - my hatred for windows pales in comparison to my hatred for that device.

@@masaufuku1735 you can run Linux on your Mac.

Quitting IT to sell ancient looking clothes is something... Quite a testimonial. Thank you for that. Greetings from Portugal.

Thank you for your support!

Hi. I'm your neighbor (literally). I live in Rio Grande do Sul near Chui, the southernmost border of Brazil. Many people call those who live near this region "Brasiguaio", because Spanish is already mixed with Portuguese, and the Uruguayan Gaucho and Brazilian Gaucho culture unites the two regions of the countries into one. Now that I've made my presentation, a curiosity. I have seen a movement some time ago of many Brazilian programmers going to Uruguay. Despite Brazil having a much richer market in technology, Uruguay has made a great incentive to take programmers from here to the other side of the border. It's been working, I have two friends from São Paulo who are in Montevideo.

Thank you!! I'll never truly leave COBOL, even if I'm not working on it every day. It's like vim- it's just part of my brain now.

​@@VeronicaExplainstalking is a great way to get things off/out your brain... I suggested Podcasting via the 2.0 spec as a additional way to so just that... Like blogging its a longer form then video and can provide a different outlet for Cobol or whatever else... Someone apparently felt my comment was spam... 1st and only spam report in the history of my account 😢

I didn't choose the z/OS life, the z/OS life chose me.

@@VeronicaExplains brr vim🙀

Veronica has time now to explain COBOL. 😅

Soon I'll be able to do so! One of the challenges for me has always been ownership of code written. The end of the road for my active COBOL development time will facilitate more discussion! :)

@@VeronicaExplains as someone who had years of COBOL programming on non-IBM (mini/mainframe) systems, I've always wondered what your platform was and hearing that it was X86 (OpenCOBOL/GNUCobol or Micro Focus I would imagine) makes my heart leap! It's tough to find a gig out there for COBOL that's on an IBM platform hence the requirements of JCLandDB2 for most current openings. My NCR/Unisys COBOL background is good enough for standard COBOL (ANSI) and can get the job done but if one doesn't have IBM experience you're usually not considered. Excited for you and for the new content especially your COBOL history. Good luck!!

why cobol?

Amen.

@@markgreen2170 For fun? For profit? Some of us just simply like to constantly learn to stuff; we get our kicks out of learning. Some want to learn COBOL because one can make a life-long career out of it. For some, it's both.

Thank you!!!

Thank you! It's been a blast so far and I'm excited for what's next!

Sorry that I had to ruin the 42 likes, but I wanted to like the comment 😅

Oh my goodness, thank you so much!!

What's covered in middle school engineering?

I picked up 2 shirts from your merch store to help out :). Hopeful it helps you out a bit during your break.

@@GladeSwope : COBOL isn’t hard to read. It was designed to have sentence like structure. Maybe the original programmer wasn’t a very COBOL programmer. That’s not COBOLs fault. BTW, I can code in multiple computer languages, including COBOL, but prefer Assembly Language as well.

Uhm that does not sound like a very productive use of her time really I think there are a lot of videos like that on youtube that are competing, also does her channel even focus on instruction videos cause on my first glance it's mostly odd-ware or very specific short tutorials.

Do you know why ROWNUM in oracle slows queries a lot ?

Thank you! I plan to do a bit more about music making on Linux, as it's not the focus of many of the music channels and it's definitely a *whole thing*. As someone who's been making music on Linux since around 2006 or so, there's a lot to talk about!

I find it strange that applications in C are sometimes considered legacy and some managers want them to be modernized by rewriting them in Java.

Thank you so much! As far as the sound on the outro, pretty sure it's my Subdecay Liquid Sunshine (overdrive pedal) going into my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. If I remember correctly, I also used a JHS 3-series distortion DI'd right into my interface for the solo part (not sponsored by any of the aforementioned brands, just like their stuff).

@@VeronicaExplains Hello! Can I listen to the whole track?

I don't want to get too into the weeds publicly here, other than to say that our health insurance in the United States is pretty awful, and I'm lucky to have coverage through another member of the household at present.

@@VeronicaExplains Awful is an understatement. I had to go to the emergency room a week after I was laid off from my job and the bill came in just under $20k, yep, count it $20,000. Healthcare is definitely a concern for my next steps too.

wow, I’ve never seen x86 cobol. Only on big iron, mainframe.

COBRA is the most expensive way to buy insurance. Individuals have the ability to buy direct from the insurers, which does cut the cost pretty dramatically. I'm a contract-for-hire worker, paying my own insurance every month, and it's doable.

@@fivevs1 I suspect most COBOL code today is running in an emulated "Big Iron" environment. I saw this happen 20 years ago, pushed by a "Big Iron" purveyor themselves (Unisys).

Oh, once the dust has settled and the servers are offline and the work is in the rear view, I'm sure I'll talk about it.

Last year, we had interns who learned it from two senior developers, and most of them stayed with it.

@@VeronicaExplains Please do.

Ooooo, I'd love to cover all of that at some point. I've seen a lot of COBOL using bespoke versioning such as renaming an old file from FILE.CBL to FILE.CBL.BAK_YYMMDD, that sort of thing. That's mostly for less maintained codebases, though- I often script out a conversion to git for those and then use git going forward. Proper unit tests aren't baked into any of the projects I work on but I fake it out with compiler tests- as I compile a program I script out some additional tests to make sure the data does what I expect it to (essentially "test-driven development"). My guess is that some compilers or runtimes might even allow some sort of unit testing, but licensing has always been trouble at my small scale. Larger teams probably have a much easier time building proper tests.

Thank you so much!!!!

Thank you so much for the kind words and the support!

Probably worth a video, but basically because in the first wave of "computers are awesome" everybody jumped on COBOL because it was the best language for business applications at the time. And billions (some estimates say hundreds of billions or trillions) of lines of code were written in COBOL. Many of those systems were well engineered in stable and established businesses and basically did everything they were supposed to, so it would have been costly and pointless to replace them. At some point all of the developers who wrote the programs were retired or dead and most people had moved on to other languages, which only make the prospect of porting these programs more expensive. So they're still around... running half the world quietly in the background.

That's what I heard too

If you want to get into it, it's pretty straight forward. It's a much smaller learning curve than a lot of other languages because, while archaic, it was intended for a particular use case and isn't the swiss army knife that things like C, C++, Perl and Python became.

For Y2K you got to determine your own salary.

If you can read english, you can write cobol.

Oh, the money is great. Someone asked me what I'll miss about COBOL day-to-day, and I definitely said "getting paid to do COBOL." Stable contracts, good pay, reasonably predictable work. It has a ton of advantages.