Watched a TNT movie called We Were Soldiers and was inspired to write a small blurb of my story of an early job I had working for a large military project called JCALS. It was the closest I'd ever come to serving my country. No, I was not a soldier but the environment and the culture was similar. It was in the early 90s. A small group of young engineers were put in charge of the bleeding edge design of a distributed database system for a billion dollar government project. The culture was similar to a war. A large sum of money was riding on a very small group of engineers producing a system that could solve the problem of joining logistics information for the 5 armed services. The players were similar. I was surrounded by ex-military posing as IT project managers. There were management concepts like chain of command. We even had people with backgrounds in psychology to monitor the troops (developers). The project had many personnel but the group I worked for was building the heart of the system. At one point in time, I truly questioned if we were working towards building something real or if this was just an exercise in retraining military personnel to work in information systems roles.

    I could write a whole book on my observations of life inside a high stakes government systems project. I could point out stories, characters, and the culture clashes between todays young engineers when you put them in a military setting.

    I think I will dedicate this month to stories about this time in my life. This was the time where I became a hardened engineer. This was the time I learned to treat every engineering problem as a war, a war that could only be won by leveraging every ounce of imagination and skill you have. The skills and hardening I received in this project have carried me throughout my career. They have helped me to lead lesser experienced engineers through uncertainty to solutions to multi-million dollar problems.

Originally wrote this a few days ago around midnight. Re-pasted it so that we could get the summary to show up.