I joined IBM 16 years ago now, back in 1988. At the time, I had no idea what career I wanted to follow. I had graduated from Southampton University, where I had studied Physics and Computing. IBM looked like a good place to work, and I started my career in the CICS Change Team. CICS is one of IBM's most successful pieces of software. The Change Team are a group of programmers that work on problems reported by the world's CICS customers.

After I had been working in the Change Team for five years or so, I had learnt how large parts of CICS worked, and was even an expert in a few areas. It is such a huge piece of software that nobody can be said to be an expert in all of it!

Having learnt a lot about CICS in that time, I felt that it was worth trying to spread my knowledge and help other people learn about it. I decided that I would like to write technical articles about different parts of CICS. There are many programmers around the world that have to use CICS, and they are interested in knowing as much as they can about it. So, I started to write technical reports and papers. I have written about 50 of these in the past decade. They are published in a number of journals and have an audience of 50,000 people or so. I get a lot of emails from CICS programmers who have read my articles, and I have made a lot of friends over the years thanks to my writing. People ave told me that they find my articles very useful to them, and this is very rewarding!

Is it easy to write an article? Absolutely! Provided that you have three things of course. The first is an idea about what to write. I am lucky because there are lots of things to do with CICS that are worth writing about. The second thing you need is the time to do the writing. I do a lot of my writing when I am sat in the car waiting for my daughter's dancing lessons to end! And the third thing you need is to like writing. This is something that you either do or don't. I am one of those people that just likes to write stuff. I used to love English at school, and always enjoyed having to write essays and things like that, I am happy sitting at my computer with a white screen in front of me, typing away.

When I was younger, I used to write science fiction stories and send them off to American magazines. They never got published - I got lots of rejection letters sent back! But, that was a good experience, because it taught me a lot about what was good and bad writing. The best way to learn anything is to make mistakes and learn from them.

So, if you like writing at school, and enjoy the idea of doing it as part of your job when you start work, then maybe you could end up like me!