‘Because We’ve Always Done It This Way’ Is Not a Reason to Do Anything: Niall Ashley on IT Social Hour
Niall Ashley, a technical consultant at Vertali, shares his unique perspective on the mainframe industry in this episode of IT Social Hour
Click here to listen to the audio-only version.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Andy Wig:
Hello everyone. It’s time for another episode of IT Social Hour. I’m Andy Wig, senior editor at TechChannel, and today it is my pleasure to have on the show someone who you’ll probably recognize if you pay any attention at all to the mainframe ecosystem. That’s none other than Niall Ashley, he comes from the aviation industry, got in the mainframe space about five years ago, hasn’t looked back. He’s one of the more visible people on the platform out there I that includes his participation in the user group WAVEZ, the Open Mainframe project. He’s a podcast host for the Mainframe Society, speaker at numerous conferences, writer of numerous LinkedIn articles. He is all over the place constantly demonstrating his knack for articulating what’s going on in the mainframe world. That’s why it is my honor to welcome on Niall Ashley to IT Social Hour. Hey Niall, how you doing?
Niall Ashley:
Hi. Yeah, thank you. I’m honored to be here. It’s a pleasure. I’m transfixed by all the nice things you’ve said. I think some people would see it in a different way. They’d say, God, I can’t get rid of that guy. Every time I try to mute him and unfollow him from my feed, he keeps coming back. This guy, can you tone it down? But some people like the content.
Wig:
We were talking about having you on last year and then in the fall and I go TechXchange and I see your face on this big banner in one of the rooms. I’m like, oh, I started to get nervous. I’m like, man, this guy’s kind of a big deal. But here we are. But you’ve been on, I think you were saying you’ve been on every mainframe podcast basically.
Ashley:
I think there’s maybe two or three that I know I haven’t been on, but I guess generally speaking, yeah, if you were to go through most of the major podcasts, most of the major kind of interviewers … obviously Mainframe Society that I do. But then there’s just loads of different ones, to be honest. Ironically, one of the ones I haven’t been on yet is the Vertali podcast and I work there. So they did invite me, but it just hasn’t worked out yet because their timings. But yeah, so I’ve been around, but to be honest, I’d love to come back maybe in five or 10 years time and revisit what does my journey look like since the first interview, what has changed over a decade? So yeah, maybe I’ll have a little break for the next, I dunno, six years or something, and then I’ll come back and people will be like, oh, I’m sick of him again.
Wig:
Yeah, you kind of got to leave them wanting more. Right. And then you make your grand—
Ashley:
Everyone looks forward to a sequel, don’t they.
Wig:
I just thought it was really interesting hearing when I first learned about you. I started doing this a little over a year ago. I was going over 2023 Rising Stars content for TechChannel looking at that. And I saw that you had this, well, aerospace, aviation background. You were basically an engineer in the aviation industry, right? And then yeah, I just thought, wow, that’s kind of an interesting transition. I think you were a physical engineer, right? It wasn’t just—
Ashley:
Yeah, so we basically worked in subassembly kind installation, so we would install different components to the aircraft. I trained with a lot of electrical and fuel systems, a lot of different caveats, hydraulics. But I ultimately ended up as much as I wanted to work on the really cool parts like ailerons, so you could say, oh, I’m the reason that this aircraft can roll and bank and your, or whatever. It didn’t work out like that. And I ended up working on the bleed air system, which effectively takes the hot air from the engine and sort of uses it for a thermal distribution and pressurization. So when you get little taps above your head where you can turn the aircon on and get a blaster cold air, and when the pressurization of the air, that’s all related to the bleeder system. So working on that was, I mean, it was kind of repetitive.
You do the same sort of work every day, but it was good work and it was technical, and I love that now when I go on a Ferris wheel, I can look at split pins or wire locking and I can go, oh, I can see the techniques they’ve used to make sure that this is structurally sound. So that was really rewarding, but I didn’t have a future with any real progression or prospects in that industry. I really am someone who loves to learn more and do more, and I’ve got a lifelong ambition to continue learning. And it just felt like I was going to stagnate in that role if I stayed there any longer. And I felt like I was already stagnating after not so many months and hence the complete career change in a way that most people would never dream of doing.
Wig:
And can you tell me a little bit about just what is the difference? Obviously the jobs you’re doing are very different in aviation and then on the mainframe, but I’m curious to hear just what the work life, how the work life differs maybe between being a mainframer and being an aviation engineer.
Ashley:
I think obviously you’ve got your flexible working remote working hybrid working. You can’t do that with a wing. You get this big aircraft and you just can’t take it home and work from home. But as a result, you see less of your colleagues in the mainframe industry unless you have that expectation, that obligation to go into the office X number of days a week. You don’t see people as often, but when you do, people feel more likely to want to stay for drinks after work, maybe go out for dinner. People who’ve commuted from a long distance, which again, working in aeronautical engineering or aviation engineering, people would generally live within a sort of close proximity to the factory. Whereas in the mainframe space, we’ve got colleagues who might be in Ireland, so they have to take a flight over, they might be driving or getting the train from Scotland, all sorts of different parts of England and Wales.
So when we meet and we stay at the hotel, everyone’s so much more inclined to socialize. And it was weird working in a factory, having so many people who you see and you talk to every day and you sit with on your lunch break, it doesn’t actually feel like you always have the opportunity to socialize or that people want to socialize. So it’s a bizarre kind of oxymoron, a kind of contradiction where you’ve got this, you spend less time around your colleagues and you’re inclined to, I dunno, share and discuss and collaborate. So despite the fact that they’re so different, they somehow mesh and they work. But then obviously when you talk about work life within aviation, you are potentially getting chemicals on yourself and you are getting, say with wire locking, you have this really thin wire and inevitably you always end up getting it under your fingernail and it’s really painful and you can’t do anything about it because it’s pierced directly under your fingernail. And I don’t have to worry about that anymore. So I’ve got no contact dermatitis, so I’ve got no, the most I get now maybe is a paper cut. And even then, how much physical paper do you use anymore? Everyone uses PDFs and word documents.
Wig:
Even that danger is gone maybe, I don’t know, maybe carpal tunnel from typing and stuff.
Ashley:
To be honest, I’m most concerned when I work, I like to get in the zone. I might put a two hour Red Hot Chili Peppers album on or just a mix tape of all these songs. And I put my headphones on and I turn the volume all the way up. And it’s at the point where my partner can literally be inches away from me borderline screaming my name like Niall, it’s lunchtime and I won’t hear her. So I’m probably going to get hearing loss. And ironically, people are more likely to get in a factory because of rivet guns and all this machinery that’s so loud and I’m going to get it just because I can’t stop listening to music while I work.
Wig:
I just have to get in the zone having the noise canceling and headphones on, just blasting it.
Ashley:
That’s it. And when I feel like that’s actually something that is maybe true of both industries is when you’re in the zone and people at Airbus would put their earphones on, I’m not sure whether you’re actually allowed to, but people did their earphones listening to me is going to ear defenders over that just to block out any dangerous noises. But people would get in the zone and you wouldn’t even realize you’ve done a six hour stint, you’ve done multiple hours in a row, just in the zone, and you’re just working and you’re just in your flow state. So that’s something that I think is possible regardless of job
Wig:
Flow state. Yeah, I think that whole concept is fascinating. I think that’s kind of what we’re always looking for. I mean, if you can make six hours of work go by like that and just almost going unconscious in a way, I mean I guess that’s what we’re aiming for, right? Yeah. So I’m interested, was there much overlap in the skills you brought to the mainframe? I’m sure there’s basic math stuff and all of that, right? But I’m curious what you learned in the aviation and maybe how you’re able to apply that.
Ashley:
I guess a major thing is understanding documentation and process. So when you are working on machinery, dangerous machinery to build something that’s got to be at such a high level of quality and safety, we don’t want aircraft falling out the sky. There is no lay by at 37, 20 8,000 or whatever feet in the air. If an aircraft’s struggling, it can’t just pull in, call the mechanic, right? We’ll fix it and we’ll keep going. It’s serious stuff. You’ve got to make sure you use the right tools, the right processes, you’ve got to follow the guidelines, you’ve got to maintain standards. It is similar in the way to the mainframe industry because if it’s just one website, if you are looking at, we’ve got, I dunno, our video game and we’ve got a website to advertise the video game battlefield.com to promote the battlefield game, that’s great.
But that website going down doesn’t stop the game from running. Whereas if your mainframe system goes down, you can’t just go, oh well, we’ll wait for the website to come back up. That is potentially millions of people depending on the area who can’t get their food or they can’t get their food delivered or their orders can’t be processed or their bank details can’t be processed and they can’t pay for things, they can’t take transactions out of the ATM and that is a catastrophic situation. You could have someone who shuts down transport for London, all the underground, all of a sudden every ticket is invalid. So does the underground system just let everyone on the tube for free maybe. But then how much could that cost them? It’s a really big deal. So that is something that’s similar. And I know that’s quite a vague answer.
Someone might go, well, process is important in any job. But I think it’s the scale at how important it’s, but I think the other thing is with engineering, you really have to study not just what you are doing physically, like installing something, but why is it done that way? Could we make this more efficient? This thing is made out of, I don’t know, steel. Could it be made out of any aluminum? Does it have to have a certain tensile strength? But is that worth the tensile strength is so important that it is offset by weight and therefore aerodynamics could be cost. So you’ve really got to think about that. And that kind of efficiency mindset is so useful in the mainframe industry and in security engineering because you are looking at what is an exploit and how far could a hacker a threat utilize that vulnerability, exploit that vulnerability?
How much leeway would it give them? How far through the system could they get? So you’ve got to maintain the same framework but almost twist it on its head. You are not thinking about how is it going to be good for the company or good for the aircraft, but actually how is it good for our threats? How could it be bad for the system? And then equally, you’ve got to be able to actually remediate that. And that’s the same with engineering. If you drill a hole and you drill it in the wrong place, you might have to oversize the hole and use a bigger rivet. And that is possible, but it needs to be approved. It needs to be validated because health and safety, and they might need to say, right, we’ve used a bigger rivet, but that means there’s a smaller gap between the rivets because the one in the middle is bigger. So that could cost on again, on safety. And so it’s really multifaceted. I think the important points for me are you’ve got your process, your guidelines, and then that efficiency mentality about fixing things, about studying the nature of a problem and how could it be utilized, solved, but equally how could it be utilized by the threat and still how can it be solved?
Wig:
So you went from, had the role of the play and keeping airplanes in the sky and now you have a role of play and keeping mainframes on. That’s a lot of pressure. How do you deal with
Ashley:
That? Yeah, well it’s actually funny. I love the kind of challenge. So I don’t feel the pressure as much. I just think of it as any other job. If you’re stuck in shelves in a supermarket, you should do it. Well, not because the whole world’s at risk, but just because you want to have pride in your job. So it doesn’t make a difference to me if it’s a mainframe, an aircraft or I’m stuck in, in the shell was at a retailer, or I’m throwing newspapers, I’m doing my paper rounds when I was 13 years old. You’ve got to have pride in your job, and so you’ve got to do a job that you are happy. Being affiliated with that is kind of your stamp on there. So if it’s bad, that’s your effectively getting that bad rep. So I don’t really feel the pressure as much because I feel like I’ve always had this mentality of do it right, do it first time, do it right first time. But yeah, I don’t have any kind of, I guess the standard vices. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I just roll dice and play D&D lot. And I guess that’s the closest I get to gambling is do I hit, do I miss? So that’s the closest I get to my stress coping mechanism.
Wig:
Okay. Yeah, you got to have an outlet, right?
Ashley:
Absolutely. Yeah. You’ve got to have something to look forward to after a long day.
Wig:
And I think people probably appreciate just having someone coming from another industry. I mean, I know you’re not the only one that came to the mainframe community from somewhere else, but I think there’s a certain appreciation out there for having kind of fresh blood, fresh eyes, someone who maybe just came from a completely different sphere of technology. And you might be able to, I bring new ideas to the for, I’m curious just what you think about that concept, the importance of constantly bringing in fresh eyes to an industry.
Ashley:
I mean, everyone has something to bring. There’s a point that I always think about at Vertali. We’ve got a guy who joined very recently, I believe not six months ago, and he’s ex army. And so he used to work in, I think radios and signals. And that’s fascinating. That’s a really important, obviously part of the military. But he’s sort of having to kind of like me come from a very different industry. He didn’t go to uni and study like computer science just like me. He didn’t have maybe this background with an exhaustive number of feats achievements in the IT space. But I think what I would always say is, and I’ve always said this same through Airbus or even working in retail at Waitroses, you’ve got to have a mentality that’s right for the job. I think I always summarize it is it’s all about attitude, not aptitude, because people can learn on the job. I always sort of say it isn’t easy, but if I wanted to, and I know it would take me a long time, but if I wanted to, I could learn the theory of relativity. Anyone could. It’s not a matter of whether you can or can’t. It’s about whether you want to. And I think that’s so true of the mainframe is people go, oh, that’s not my discipline, it’s not my domain, it’s not my problem. Well, maybe not, but you’re not going to grow and expand unless you make it your problem.
I’m now in a bit of a bizarre position where I’m almost doing less security administration and engineering than I used to. And I’m refocusing my time on clients where there’s more sort of zeto s systems programming. And that’s because I’ve noticed that maybe that’s an area I have shortcomings in and I need to make sure I have really clear understanding of a system. You can’t defend a system you don’t understand. You can’t defend a castle if you dunno. Its weaknesses. It’s how it’s built where look at Lord of the Rings and Helms deep, they’ve got that little grate in the sewer grate and all it takes is one explosive from the III and the whole thing erupts. And that’s the thing, you have to know what you are defending. And I mean, I’m full of nerdy references like this, but yeah, I think Marcus has so much to offer despite being in the army because he has a different frame of mind, and that’s what we want.
If everyone has this mentality of we’ve always done it this way, we’ll keep doing it that way because we’ve always done it that way. You never have any growth. You never have any changing development. Oh, well, that JCL has always being used. Well, could it be better? Oh, we’ve always used that, Rexx, why? It’s only by challenging that you kind of go, damn, there’s a real opportunity for innovation here. And I guess without that mentality of being able to challenge things and see them differently, we’d still be using horse and cars. We wouldn’t be using automobiles or cars or electric cars. We wouldn’t be using the modern aircraft we have. We’d still be using rotary propeller aircraft. Everything’s different now because people have said, why do we do it this way? Can we do it differently? Would it be better? And so I always think, yeah, maybe Marcus doesn’t know as much as someone who’s got a decade or two decades or three decades of experience, and maybe I don’t, but that’s why we should be listened to because we’ve not maybe practiced the wrong way rather than reinventing the formula where possible.
Wig:
Oh yeah. So you were talking earlier, sorry, you were talking about your paper route, I think, and there’s a connection between fresh eyes and the paper route and how you kind of make it your own job. Does that apply to the mainframe? Can you kind of make it your own? I mean, I’m interested your paper route.
Ashley:
I wouldn’t imagine the exact scenario being the same between Mark Wilson and my old boss when I worked this newspaper around when I did this paper route and I delivered the newspapers. And yet there’s something similar. She used to say to me, this lady, she was lovely. I think she was Iranian, and she’d moved to my hometown and she set up this kind of local news agent and I’d come and I’d collect the newspapers. And the first few times you do the rounds, you think, oh, I’m 13, whatever years old. Who am I to tell an adult what to do kind Matilda, where they say, I’m big, you’re small, I’m right, you’re wrong. And I’m an adult and you’re just a child, so you don’t say anything. And then one day I just thought, look, I’m going to ask, I start this paper round, I come from let’s say the west side of my hometown and I finish on the east side and then I have to cycle all the way back, but actually the newspaper store is maybe in the middle.
So I almost go double back finish and then I have to get all the way back again. I was like, maybe there’s a better way here. And so I asked her, could I just do the round in reverse? Could I just adjust the order a little bit? And she said to me, I remember she said, it’s your baby. It’s your baby. You have the trust, you have the responsibility. And I know Mark Wilson would never say it with an Iranian accent. And I know he’s in a very different context. It’s not my baby. Maybe it’s the client’s baby, but I am still responsible for that thing, that entity, whether it’s a newspaper round or a child or a mainframe, I have to make sure what I’m doing is, but I also have to be able to trust myself. And sometimes you make mistakes and people make mistakes with their kids.
They give ’em too much sugar and they go hyperactive. But you just do your best job. You’ve got to be diligent, you’ve got to do your best job. So yeah, every time I got a new paper round and every time we added new clients or lost clients and it changed, I’d always reinvent it. And I always double checked, is that okay? And she said, it’s your baby. And so now I have a lot more trust in myself with my job, but equally, I still think if I went to it for any number of places, if I went all the way to IBM and I ended up executive vice president, and the very, very top boss said to me, no, you need to trust yourself. It’s your baby that’s going to follow me through the rest of my career. This mentality of just trusting myself and taking accountability. So yeah, it’s weird. Again, like you say about the paper round, it’s something that at 13 years old, you learn this kind of mentality and you think, how is this going to be relevant? Surely this has no, that’s not going to tie into my mainframe career riding a bike, riding, carrying newspapers, giving them to the owners. And yet somehow it all ties together.
Wig:
Yeah, it’s like, I mean, hey, just because maybe new in a certain line of work, you still have good ideas, I guess. And it’s about trusting, believing and believing that you can have those ideas. And I mean, I guess if someone puts the trust in you, I guess you got to trust yourself at that point, right?
Ashley:
Yeah. And I think that’s one of the reasons why when I was writing up, there was a series called, which we hoped to revisit this year, called Weird and Wonderful Journeys. And we wrote for the waves page on LinkedIn that was all about what’s a framework, a mentality that’s been useful from a different industry, but it’s been useful in the mainframe space. And you’d be surprised how much there’s been nannies and shepherds and people whose strong women competitions and you think, what the hell’s that got to do with the mainframe? And yet it’s a mentality. And so I always think with Marcus, don’t be afraid to ask someone, I appreciate that this isn’t relevant. You maybe ask your mom, your dad, your kids your best friend, you don’t know anything about the technical side of what I do, but what’s the mentality that stuck with you? And you’d be surprised how relevant they are.
Wig:
So going back, you talked about some hobbies, you’re in the d and d and that helped you do your job because it is an outlet and all that. But another outlet I know you have is baking. You bring baked goods to, you’re known as the guy who brings in baked goods to conferences, right?
Ashley:
Yeah. I brought five cakes to GS UK this year or this year in November, just gone. And I made three chocolate Guinness cakes, which was a Nigel Lawson recipe. And I did a pear cake, which was gluten-free and a pear crumble. And then my partner baked some like smarties blondies or m and m blondies. So between us, we baked six cakes and we brought them in, and I was completely, I was knackered from the weekend baking. My whole day was just taking things out the oven, putting the next batch in, mixing stuff up. But I love seeing a smile on people’s face, and it’s a little gesture, but I think it really did mean a lot to people. But I’m trying to tone it down. I keep saying I love doing this, but it’s my birthday coming up soon. Someone’s got to bake me a cake. I’m not taking any, what do you call, I’m not taking any requests at the moment, no commission. I just want a cake for myself in what, a couple of weeks? Like three weeks?
Wig:
Yeah. There’s no substitute for having someone bake you your own cake. That’s a nice thing. You got to have that. And the baking thing, I don’t want to strain the drawing, the connections between these different activities and the mainframe too much. But I mean, that’s also a thing where there’s several elements that are kind of, there’s several analogs there. You got to have, well, mise en place, having the right ingredients.
Ashley:
Exactly. So I kind of made a little joke about this a while ago, and it sort of inspired a whole article, which I’m in the process of writing, and it’s taken me a while because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but I had this kind of idea about baking and cooking and what that’s got in common with mainframes. And one of the things that I thought was this joke, which was really funny, was I said, you’ve got your shoe pastry dessert. Maybe it’s a shoe burn or it’s an eclaire something that is very nice. But I said, no one really focuses on the actual pastry itself. No one ever cares about the outer casing. You’re really there for either the cream or the crem, patis, whatever it is, creme on glaze, that kind of custody filling. And I said, it’s kind of the same with your J jcl.
No one really cares about the job card, the job card’s, just the transportation. It’s the means of delivery. But actually you’ve got your DD statements, that’s your Creon glaze, you’ve got all your functions, maybe you’ve even embedded some wrecks in there and some pros and all sorts. And you go, that’s the bit I’m here for. I love a curry, but I’m not like if it had azo instead of rice, if it had noki, I mean, if you didn’t eat curry with rice and you ate it with bread, it’s just a carbohydrate. It’s the delivery mechanism. But the main star of the show is the curry, or as I say with the cla, it’s kind filling. And that to me is such a funny kind of thought was it’s obviously got to to be done, right? You don’t want to rubbish hard, dry, crumbly, almost dehydrated delivery mechanism with your pastry, but it isn’t the star of the show.
And there’s loads of little things that I just thought, and like you said with me on, plus it all ties in when you are making your, say whether it’s a job that you’re submitting or whether it’s some you’re executing, whatever it is, some Carla that you are setting up to work as a reporting script as part of a wider function, maybe it’s some compliance checks. You’ve got to make sure your input’s correct. And you need to be really crystal clear. What is your input and why? What are you saying, Carla? What are you selecting? What are you excluding and how are you selecting it? And on what complex? And maybe did you do, I dunno, say you might look at Niall, you might go, Niall Asta. Well wait a minute, that’s quite dangerous because that’s anything following Niall. But do you want Niall Ashley? In which case you specify that, or maybe there’s Niall, Ashley Niall as you want, Niall two, you put Ashley Asta.
Or maybe you just want anyone with a first name Niall, but not necessarily the right surname. So again, you could use different combinations of wildcard characters, you could use percents percentages and asterisk. And that to me, as you means is on. Plus, you’ve got to have everything ready in its right place before you use it. And if you don’t crumble, it’s going to struggle at the first hurdle because you’ve not even got your basic inputs ready before you’re trying to run all these complex processes. You cannot cook a good egg fried rice if you haven’t got any of your ingredients ready, because that wok is going to be boiling hot. You need to be able to add everything, bam, bam, bam, quick, quick, quick. Otherwise it’s just going to either burn or it’s going to be on a low heat and then it’s not going to really fry properly, which I appreciate, again, is a weird analogy to bring of weird anecdote when you’re talking about mainframes. But you’ve got to do it right. And that kind of quality focused mindset is important. Whatever career you’re in.
Wig:
So when you’re bringing this cake to a conference like GSE UK in person conference, are these the kind of conversations you’re having as you’re all sitting, standing around, sitting around eating the cake, talking about the parallels between baking in the mainframe or maybe you wish, okay.
Ashley:
Yeah, not yet. I think that’s the area where maybe I’m spending so much time doing the baking and giving away the cake, and I’m spending so much time and then rushing around at the conference. I’m a stream lead of a chairperson. I’m hosting a public quiz. I don’t really, to be honest, I said this year, I think it was the first conference where I would actually say I enjoyed it less than I didn’t enjoy it as a ratio. I was so overwhelmed. It was actually quite intense. I felt like, damn, I need to pull back a little bit next year. I need to reevaluate my priorities. It wasn’t the conference that was bad, it was me saying yes to too many people and pulling myself too thin. There’s an expression in Lord of the Rings, I think he said something like, I feel like butter spread over too much bread.
That was how I felt like I was spread too thin. And I think that’s a mentality that I need to stop saying yes to so many people. Mark Wilson tells me that all the time. Everyone says to me, stop being a yes man. You’ve got to look after yourself. But yeah, I want to spend more time talking about the cakes. It’s like the cake is almost like we talked about earlier. It’s the delivery mechanism for a wider conversation. I would like us maybe this year, so November, 2026, maybe we do an afternoon tea session and we talk about that. So there’s cakes that are given away, but we use the giveaway as an opportunity to discuss an important topic. I would like to do a keynote I was talking to at Bevan from BMC software, and we’d love to do a keynote talking about this. And we said, it’d be fun to dress up, have the big French baking hats and wear an apron and maybe do afternoon tea at the conference as a keynote.
But I think, yeah, it’s a conversation that needs to be had because sometimes people don’t realize how much their hobbies or their passions can actually influence or be influenced by their job. And sometimes that’s not healthy. You do want to have a kind of clear boundary. I want to clock off at five, and I don’t want to be thinking about work too much while I’m baking because that’s supposed to be my fun after a long stressful day. But equally, there’s things that can inspire you and that is okay to be inspired while you are doing something different. I’ve talked to Devonte, we both love Lego, we both love d and d, and me and Devonte Hawkins, were talking about this kind of weird mishmash between a D&D, Lego mainframes and how we’d make that work, how that might look. And I know he’s working on some amazing things behind the scenes. And that to me is, again, it’s beautiful. It’s this idea of why should my job not also be my passion again, within reason, as long as I’m not too overwhelmed by it. To answer your question, have we had that conversation? Not yet. But there’s intention.
Wig:
Okay, maybe you can do a whole baking demo and somehow turn that into a mainframe lesson at one of these conferences. That would be fun.
Ashley:
Yeah. I dunno how we’d make it work, but I’d love to see what’s possible. I’m to do some D&D inspired session at GS UK this year. I’m thinking of maybe doing little short form sessions, maybe like five, 10 minute sessions. And I was thinking about it, and I’ve got this idea. And again, it’s like, why don’t I combine the best of some of my favorite things? So yeah, we’ll see what happens.
Wig:
It’s great to have a hook too, to get people interested and get ’em to show up.
Ashley:
And if I’m there with some sort of armor or wizards hat or something, you’re definitely going to draw a crowd. People are going to be asking, what’s that about? So the props are the bit where it gets expensive, but they’re the bit that potentially draws your audience. So I’m aware of that.
Wig:
Maybe Vertali can make that investment for you. I mean,
Ashley:
Yeah, you can help me write a business case, pitch it to the directors.
Wig:
It’s not like something you have to use just once, right? I mean, you can, you can break that stuff up again and again. Okay, so I know another article you’re working on is this also piqued my interest, the potential you see for mainframes to handle video game workloads. I’m probably butchering the summary of that topic.
Ashley:
That is part of it, yeah.
Wig:
Yeah. Tell me.
Ashley:
It’s a bit of a weird long story where I think it was Apple, IBM and Motorola. They work together like the three of them to make, I believe it’s the firmware, maybe the operating system and chip set for a lot of old game consoles and including, I’m pretty sure, including the Nintendo Wii, Wi U, GameCube. So when I say consoles, I’m not talking about something you get in the discount section and it’s like, oh, it’s just one of those plug and play TV things from the early two thousands or the late nineties. This is real mainstream technology. And they worked together on that. And I don’t know why they stopped. And I’m sure there was a reason, and I know Intel and Nvidia and AMD are the main players in the chip set space or the hardware space of PC or console gaming now.
But I don’t see why IBM couldn’t still do things like that. And the other thing that I think about a lot is you hear about all these games that release, and on the day that they release, they say maybe you’re looking at something like Split Gate or some multiplayer online game, New World, RPGs, FPSs, et cetera. And they release and they go, oh, sorry guys, we’ve actually not hired enough servers, or we’ve not allocated enough servers. And so on the first maybe 48 hours of the game’s release, they’ve got this teething problem where people are going, I’m not playing that game because I can’t connect. I’ve wasted my money. They start issuing refunds. Everything can be quite messy. And I feel like you’d never need to worry about that on a mainframe because although you might not know how much to utilize mainframes are very, very scalable, very quick, very efficient, and you don’t have that downtime.
Oh, the servers are struggling under the way they’re really, we’ve got this server that’s basically ConEd out. It can’t handle it. Well, I’ve never heard of a mainframe. Oh, so many people are buying things at the bank at the same time, and all of a sudden this major retailer or health insurance company, whatever, just conked out and it’s given up in the middle of the day. So I do think there’s an opportunity to say, look, I’m not saying we process the kind of graphics, the rendering in real time on a mainframe, but what about all this backend data processing? What about games that are maybe turn-based? You could be looking at something like, I dunno, something like Excom or even obviously Boulders Gate 3 isn’t an online game, but if it was, again, that’s all turn based, so that’s not something that needs to be processed in real time.
You could functionally say, right, what kind of commands are you giving to your soldiers on this mission? And you set that up and you say, right, this guy’s a sniper, so he’s going to shoot that guy. This guy’s an explosives expert, he’s going to throw his grenade. And you queue all that. And then in the backend, that’s processed as a batch show on the mainframe, and it’s processed basically in one big batch instantly. And then the enemy makes their decision, and that’s all processed and sent back. So there’s all these things where I think, couldn’t we utilize this hardware? Maybe we don’t need to. And maybe it isn’t the most cost efficient, but I think it’s a shame that there’s this real history, this legacy from IBM about gaming where they don’t always acknowledge it. And actually maybe most people don’t know about it. And sort of like the mainframe sometimes it’s the unsung hero.
It’s the thing that carried the world and you didn’t know about it. So I think those are some areas where I’d love to see what’s possible. And I know that IBM do invest, I think they have invested or sponsored some eSports teams, so they’re clearly not completely disaffiliated with gaming. So I’d love to have that conversation. I’d love to maybe go to Poughkeepsie and speak to some of the executives and say, what’s possible and who would we need to talk to? Who would be the best people to talk to? Is it Blizzard with an MMO like World of Warcraft, or is it that you want to find some developers who are working on some massively multiplayer turn-based RPG? I don’t know, but I’d just love to see what’s possible. Because the mainframe is the unsung hero of the tech world. The IT entire IT ecosystem doesn’t always acknowledge that this is the main platform where all the processing’s done.
People go, oh, my Apple’s got an update, and my Windows laptop’s got an update. And it’s like the mainframe is still working there. It’s almost effortless, and it’s doing this amazing stuff. And we’re not aware of that in the same way we always talk about servers and gaming on traditional hardware. But let’s bring that conversation back. And I think I talked to some of my peers who they’re looking forward to retirement and the next decade, and they reminisce that They used to install games on, they’d work at a bank and they’d store a game on the mainframe at the bank, and they wouldn’t tell anyone, and they’d be playing games. And this is something that people used to do. They would be running games, and they weren’t necessarily something like punk, but there was D&D inspired games back in the day, like fantasy RPG games. And I just think, again, what’s to stop us from doing something there?
And the other reason I bring this up is you see clients who, and I’ve seen it myself, who have a Christmas, they have a themed ISPF panel, and they’ll be like, oh, it’s Christmas. And so they’ve got, instead of the normal boring interface, they’ve got a Christmas tree and maybe snowflakes coming down and they’ve got different ball bores and maybe a little flame that’s flickering just two frames flickering back and forth. But asci art or Obste art is possible. So why don’t we do more of that, of why don’t we say actually loads of games use askia or pixart, so why can’t we run something like that on a mainframe? And I guess the last reason I bring it up is because I know this, it’s not a Z os mainframe, but I’m pretty sure when I was at TechXcchange in Orlando in October, Elizabeth Joseph was showing off that you can run Doom on the Linux one system.
And I’m sure I might’ve got the exact minutia of that wrong, but again, I just thought, this is really cool. And it’s possible people can run doom on the LCD screen of a microwave or on a calculator. If Doom can run on anything, then why aren’t we running it on our systems? So yeah, I’d love to see what happens. I know it’s kind of a lofty dream, and it’s not IBM’s top priority, but I do think it’s fun and sometimes fun and fun is enough. I was just watching the film, Marty Supreme, and there’s a scene where this guy is talking about, this isn’t a table tennis match, this isn’t a ping pong match. This is an opportunity to advertise pens. You are missing the point. You are here, Marty. You are here to play table tennis. I’m not here to watch you play table tennis. I’m here to make sure pens get sold to the Japanese market. And that was kind of what I just thought, well, why can’t IBM do the same? Why can’t they say, look, you are here to play games. All these people are here to talk about games. We’re here to get IBM’s brand recognition out there. And I think sometimes you’ve got to spin it that way.
Wig:
Yeah, just have somewhere on the screen, this game is stable thanks to the mainframe or something like that.
Ashley:
You’ve got these opening credits of games and films, and they always saying that, well, travelers Tales or Made on the Unity engine, and what’s the stop IBM’s branding being out there? There’s no reason why not.
Wig:
Sure. Yeah.
Ashley:
But that’s an article I’m working on. But yeah, that one I put on raincheck, I was like, I’ll come back to that. And I forgot until we discussed it. So I’m definitely going to have to finish that this year. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go unpublished by 2027.
Wig:
You have to now.
Ashley:
That’s it. I’ve got an obligation.
Wig:
Yep. Yep. The last thing I wanted to cover is just kind of, and you alluded a little bit about how you want, maybe we were talking earlier, you’d like to see someone else kind of maybe fill your shoes that you’re currently occupying as this very active voice in mainframe space. Yeah. Well, one, why is that, and why do you think it’s important to kind of have fresh voices, I guess, like that?
Ashley:
I think it’s easy when you live in an echo chamber and all you hear is your own voice, or you can repeatedly see your own voice to think that is the only voice or that is the main voice, or that is the most important voice you see it with. And I’m not going to specify, obviously I’m in the uk, but I’m aware of all sorts of different politics across the world. But you do see it with politicians where they love to hear their own voice. And all my people on my benches, they all pat me on the back and tell me how great I’m, and it’s just get out, talk to people. There’s a bigger world than just you in your bubble, your sphere of influence. And I think I look at, I’ve had conversations with say, Joe Winchester, and we’re on the GS UK committee, and we’ll talk about what could GS UK do differently?
And we’ll bring that up in our committee planning meetings. And he goes to different conferences and I go to different conferences and we come back and we think that was something really cool over there, or that was something really different over here. And some of them aren’t cost efficient, but they’re just fun. Or they bring the community together. Yeah, a pub quiz. I do a pub quiz for GS UK and I’ve done it for GSE Nordic, and it doesn’t provide any real value. People were either going to go to the conference and they weren’t, but what’s the harm in having a pub quiz while they’re there? And then they have something to talk about where you get more photos of everyone having fun. And I think a lot of this stuff, it’s like it comes down to people being willing to think. I say think outside the box, but also to share and collaborate different ideas. And Joe does this thing with where he goes to conferences where he tries to change his panelists. He said to me at one point, now I’ve had you on a panel before. I won’t have you again. I want to hear more voices and I want to hear more voices from different groups.
Now, I think at the time I was like a 25 or 26-year-old man, and he’s like, but what about some of the in the industry? What about people from outside of Europe across the industry? I thought that’s so true. I think diversity is a really important thing because it really makes you perceive things differently. Me and my partner have very different socioeconomic backgrounds. She’s come from a very different sort of wealth level, income level than my family. And again, that’s really shifted how I’ve thought about things and how I’ve reprioritized things. And so I guess to answer your question, when I think about this, I don’t want to be acting like my opinion is the most important opinion, and I need to make sure that I step away before almost that pride and that ego overcomes me. What’s the expression like better to die a hero than to live and see yourself become the villain from the Dark Knight?
And I’m not saying I’m going to become a villain. I’ve got no nefarious deeds to blow up Gotham City. But I do think this year, or last year, sorry, I nominated Nishka Sardar for the Tech Channel Rising Star Award just as I was nominated two years prior to that by Gary Lon. And I was honored to have received that award. And I know she’s overwhelmed by the fact that she’s received it, but that’s because I’m proud of all the things she’s achieved. And that’s because I see her potential, and she’s going to come in with this different perspective than I am. She’s got all these things. She’s younger than me. She’s a woman. She’s got family who are from India. So her perspectives are going to be wildly different than mine. And that’s good. And that challenges things. And maybe she turns around and has an idea, and it’s not for the best.
It doesn’t end up being for the best purpose, but she’s coming in with the right intentions. And that to me is the important thing is just sharing. It doesn’t have to be right. It just has to be, it has to challenge us. Sometimes we have to be challenged by this idea of why do we do it this way and not that way? And that comes from all perspectives. Earlier on in this conversation, we talked about engineering. You look at railway systems, they always have two wheels on the ground except for there’s a railway network, and I’m forgetting the name, it’s in Al in Germany, but it’s one of the only suspended railways. So it’s actually hanging and the wheels are on the top. And that’s one of the only examples in Europe. And there’s no reason that we couldn’t do it more. I mean, in terms of engineering, it’s not perfect.
But there’s all these things where we look at and we go, well, why do we do? We always do it this way? And I’m going to quickly fall into that. I’ve had people who I trained and they’ve said, no, why do you do this? And I’m like, well, because how I was taught, it doesn’t make it right. And so I love that we keep having newer people, younger people, people with outside perspectives and saying to them, please challenge me. So yeah, so it’s important I step away because my voice isn’t the only voice, and my voice isn’t the most important voice, and I’m sure people are sick of my voice. I know I’m sick of it, and I’m sure my partner gets sick of it all the time, and ishka deserves a voice. And then in a few years, she’ll have the same moment where she’ll think the same way as I do, and she’ll say to Junior, it’s your turn.
And Vitale’s a really great company in that. That is the way that the management treat the young people. They’ll say, I look at recently, Chris Harvey, one of my colleagues said to me, I’ve been running the ZPDT that we have. I’ve been taking all these requests, and it’s time for me to entrust you, and it’s going to be hard, but I know that you can do it. And if you can’t always do it first time, just ask and we’ll help. But he’s like, I know you have that potential, and you’re not going to learn if you don’t do these things. So again, it’s your baby now. It’s your responsibility now. And yeah, fantastic. So yeah, I see the way Chris has treated me. I’ve treated ishka, and I want to see that more and more and more. I want to see more companies and trusting young people, more committees and trusting young people, all the guide shares and the shares and all these other events, the IBM events. I just want to see more and more young people, not in an age perspective being ageist, but more like they’ve maybe less experienced, is better than young people, but less experienced people saying, why do we do it this way? Why don’t we think of this differently? So yeah, that’s where I’m coming from. I want to share that limelight, but I want to further the industry while I do it.
Wig:
That’s beautiful. Making room for the next generation and what I gather that’s critical to the ecosystem and keeping those fresh ideas, fresh eyes coming, and fresh voices. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we don’t hear as much from you in the next five years, I’m sorry to hear that. I hope this isn’t one of your last public appearances for a while. Okay, good, good. But anyway, Niall, this has been just great to hear you exp expound. It’s my pleasure. Thank you. All these mainframe topics, drawing all these connections, it’s a work of art to hear you speak about this stuff, or it’s like watching a work of art, I guess. Yeah, so it move right there. Anyway, again, Niall, thanks for joining us.
Ashley:
Thank you.
Wig:
Alright, yeah, thanks Niall and everybody else, catch you next time. Bye. And don’t forget you can get all the latest on all things tech by going to techchannel.com/subscribe.