Up to now, we’ve been introducing you to members of the Db2 for z/OS Development team; however, Db2 is more than just code. Several other organizations play significant roles in delivering and supporting Db2, and in this edition we’re going to focus on a key member of one of those organizations, Paul McWilliams, Lead for the Db2 for z/OS documentation team.

Hi Paul, tell us about your role on the Db2 team.

My primary role is the Content Development Lead for the Db2 for z/OS product documentation, which means that I’m responsible for planning and managing the writing work for the official documentation for the Db2 for z/OS product. I also document many of the new capabilities and enhancements that we deliver in function levels and in new releases of Db2, and I’m constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of our content.

I also represent Db2 for z/OS on the cross-platform Db2 SQL language council, where I coordinate changes to SQL with the Db2 developers for other platforms. The goal of this council is to achieve SQL compatibility across Db2 on all platforms. And of course, I write quite a few blogs about Db2 for z/OS. Members of the Db2 for z/OS and its ecosystem community will likely have seen my name at the top of many previous entries promoting the new features of Db2 for z/OS.

What was your background before joining IBM?

I grew up in Everett, Washington, and my first adventure after high school was as an enlisted sailor in the United States Navy. After basic training in San Diego, I served aboard a rescue and salvage ship, USS Salvor ARS-52, home ported in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I served as a Quartermaster, which means that I specialized in navigation.

After completing my enlistment, I returned to the Pacific Northwest to take advantage of my education benefits and eventually enrolled at the University of Washington in 2001.

I found my way to technical writing in my first meeting with an advisor at UW, who thought that my grades and transfer credits made me a great fit for the engineering program. However, after we discussed my interest in writing, he suggested the Technical Communication (TC) program, which was part of the College of Engineering.

However, my start at UW was delayed by the events of September 2001. Because I had continued as a naval reservist, I was mobilized to join the security force at the Everett Naval Station—conveniently deployed to my hometown! I was assigned to harbor patrol and spent most of 2002 on the waters of Everett harbor.

I returned to UW in the fall of 2002 and was accepted into the TC program. An internship was a required part of the program, and in those days the IBM lab in San Jose recruited heavily from the UWTC program. I distinctly remember the interview with my future IBM manager where I was asked, “have you heard of Db2?”

I began my internship at IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory in June of 2004. My first assignment was working on content for some Eclipse-based ETL tooling in the IBM Db2 tools area.

How did you end up joining the Db2 for z/OS team?

My introduction to Db2 on the mainframe came in 2005 at the end of my internship, when IBM offered me a regular position on the Db2 for z/OS Content Development team. I joined during the early stages of development for version 9 of Db2, and I have worked on parts of the Db2 content ever since then.

How has your career at IBM changed over the years?

When I started, our assignments were book-based. Each writer owned one or more “books” and was responsible for everything between the covers. For example, I owned the Db2 Performance Guide. A drawback to this approach is that every significant technical change or new feature almost always requires updates to multiple books, which meant that multiple writers had to coordinate the changes with each other. Not long after I joined the team, I became a proponent of replacing the book-owner model with a feature-owner model, in which one writer handles all the documentation changes for each new feature or product change. This model has proven to be much more efficient, especially since we adopted the function-level approach to continuous delivery.

But what I think is the biggest difference from the early days is how fast we deliver content now, for new features and content quality improvements alike. It used to be months or even years before a customer would see the content I worked on. Nowadays, we refresh the online Db2 for z/OS content almost every week, and we keep the online PDF manuals just as current as our web-based content. This capability is essential to supporting the continuous delivery of new features in Db2 with function levels and new-function APARs, but it also lets us deliver fixes and improvements much faster.

What's the most rewarding thing to you about working on Db2 for z/OS?

As I mentioned, I’m proud of how fast and often we deliver content changes for new features and fixes, and I very much enjoy the challenge of documenting the continuous delivery of new features in function levels and new-function APARs. I’m also quite proud of the hard work I’ve put into all of the What’s new content, which is essential to informing customers about the latest features in Db2 for z/OS.

How do you spend your time away from work?

I live just down the road from the Silicon Valley Lab in Morgan Hill, California, where I enjoy spending quality time with my wife Brianne and our two daughters, Victoria and Elizabeth.

Cycling is one of favorite activities, and my favorite days involve a bicycle ride across the Golden Gate Bridge or along Monterey Bay. I own a few too many bicycles, but my current favorite is a Wilde “All Arounder” gravel bike that I built up myself from a frameset earlier this year.

Sketching is another hobby of mine, and I’ve also tried my hand at watercolor painting. My favorite subjects are landscapes and maritime scenes from the SF Bay and Puget Sound areas. You can get a closer look at some of these paintings and a few more here.

I'm also the volunteer coordinator of a nest box program at the Silicon Valley Lab where we maintain and monitor nesting activities in dozens of nest boxes for cavity nesting native bird species such as Western Bluebirds. We submit the nesting data to the California Bluebird Recovery Program.

What are you looking forward to working on?

For now, I plan to continue working on content for Db2 for z/OS. I look forward to getting started on the content for the upcoming version of Db2. I’m especially looking forward to working on the content changes that will be needed for the removal of deprecated features that Haakon Roberts, Director of Db2 for z/OS Development, mentioned is his recent blog entry, Important news regarding Db2 for z/OS versions.