John Swartzentuber ’85Ěýhas been working on that very sort of software with a company called OSIsoft for the past eight years. Swartzentruber is a development lead, working out of the company’s Philadelphia office. He leads a team of developers working on next iterations of the data analysis software, while coordinating with other team leaders, helping to plan release cycles, recruiting new staff and consulting with clients – power plants aren’t the only ones; many different industries have lots of data to manage – to improve the software’s “user experience design.”

An ideal user experience would render its designers invisible. When programs are working smoothly, doing what they’re supposed to, people don’t spend time thinking about why that’s the case.

“We strive to be unappreciated, almost,” Swartzentruber says. “If people don’t notice the software, you’re doing your job right.”

Accomplishing that often requires out-of-the-box thinking; new challenges keep things interesting.

“It’s not just rote,” he says. “You really have a lot of creative flexibility to figure out the best way to get there.”

Thirty years ago, when Swartzentruber was working on his computer science minor at EMU (a major wasn’t available yet), he took a class called “Programming Languages,” during which longtime computer science professorĚýJoe MastĚýassigned something involving a fairly esoteric language known as LISP. It was a toughie – so difficult, in fact, that Mast eventually cancelled the assignment. Inspired by the challenge, though Swartzentruber buckled down and kept at it and finally came up with a solution.

LISP isn’t something he actually uses anymore, but the appreciation it taught him for approaching problems from new angles has. Thinking of becoming a programmer? Go down the rabbit hole with something weird or obscure. Diversify your toolbox.

“It’s important to think in a different kind of way, to try something completely different,” he says.

Between Swartzentruber’s junior and senior years, EMU’s nascent computer science program suffered something of a setback: its PDP-11 – the machine that every computer student shared time on – died. (The PDP-11 was a “minicomputer,” an amusingly dated description in this smartphone era.)

That meant Swartzentruber spent his senior year working on Apple IIe computers, which turned out to be at the vanguard of the coming PC revolution, and which ultimately meant that the demise of the PDP-11 was actually a stroke of good fortune for students affected by the loss.

“In a lot of ways, I felt very well prepared [for work after college],” he says. “We sort of got into the PC world a little quicker.”

“[Teachers] get anxious,” he said, chuckling. “I’m the one they try to get a hold of.”

A computer resource technician with Harrisonburg City Public Schools, Shoemaker (’78) likens his job during the school year to firefighting, swooping in to sort things out whenever someone can’t log into their computer or get their projector to behave. Shoemaker is responsible for one high school and one middle school in the city – though these days, he’s able to fix lots of problems remotely without leaving his office.

During the summers and other calmer times, Shoemaker also keeps the schools’ computers and other devices, like iPads, up-to-date and in good working order.

In neighboring Rockingham County Public Schools,ĚýObe Hostetter ’00Ěýhas a slightly different role as an instructional technology resource teacher. Though he also gets involved in technological troubleshooting, he visits all the division’s 24 schools to train teachers on how to better use technology in their classrooms, and sometimes co-teaches technology-enhanced lessons with them. A recent example: teaching a kindergarten class how to scan QR codes with iPads.

“I enjoy the teaching part, seeing the kids getting excited [about technology],” said Hostetter, who spent his first five years after college teaching elementary and middle school before going down the technology path.

One of the tricky technology-related issues that comes up in school settings is the fact that after Hostetter’s lesson on QR codes, those kindergartners may well be more adept at using them than many of their teachers.

“They’re not as comfortable, because they have not grown up with it,” says Shoemaker, of teachers who began their careers before computers had so thoroughly infiltrated education.

While younger teachers, as a rule, don’t tend to be as intimidated by technology, there’s a flipside.ĚýDoug Moyer ’91, a systems technician for the Warren County (Virginia) Public Schools, tells of a young teacher whose Smart Board went out of service and was thrown into a tizzy by the prospect of resorting to primitive substitutes like the markerboard.

Moyer and Shoemaker both spent some time in the business world before getting into school technology, and both say they enjoy the general lower-pressure school atmosphere. Computer emergencies happen both places, but the stress and aggravation just usually aren’t as great in education.

“It has its moments of intensity, but it’s not nearly as great, and I appreciate that part of it,” said Shoemaker.

Mike Stoltzfus ’98Ěýalso began his IT career in private business, beginning with CMDS (now Jenzabar; see story p. 15) after graduating with a computer information systems degree. He then spent several years handling IT for Harman Construction, a company that has worked on numerous projects at EMU over the years, including the ongoing renovations of the Suter Science Center. While he worked for Harman, Stoltzfus also ran his own web hosting business on the side. One of his clients was Eastern Mennonite School (EMS), which created a full-time IT position and hired Stoltzfus to fill it inĚý2008.

With just under 400 students in grades K-12, the school’s IT needs are modest enough that Stoltzfus handles most technology-related issues (Andrew Gascho ’09Ěýassists him, and teaches digital communication classes at EMS). Those range from systems maintenance to troubleshooting to repairs to keeping up with the rapidly changing digital world by planning things like a Chromebook-for-every-student initiative that the school is exploring.

“That’s something that really attracts me about working at a place where there isn’t a huge technology infrastructure,” Stoltzfus said. “I can be involved in all those different things…. I enjoy seeing the whole picture.”

(Since starting at EMS, Stoltzfus’s job has expanded well beyond that whole IT picture; now the director of business affairs, he also oversees school finances and a few other operational matters.)

There’s never a time when there’s not something new to check out. With a relatively tight budget to be conscious of, for example, Stoltzfus has been exploring opportunities offered by open source software.

“I really enjoy learning new things. That’s one thing that I’ve always enjoyed about technology – it’s always changing,” said Stoltzfus, who majored in computer information systems. “As you learn about things, you realize more and more how much you don’t know.”

Like Stoltzfus,ĚýJon Harder ’82Ěýalso works as a technology generalist for a small school system, handling “pretty much anything to do with technology” for Mountain Lake (Minnesota) Public Schools.

In addition to all the usual school troubleshooting and software updating, Harder has been able to put his programming background to good use as the schools’ technology coordinator. When a need was identified for a computer-based method for staff to reserve rooms or vehicles to use, Harder couldn’t find existing software that fit the bill. Instead, he created his own web-based application that’s now in use. It’s the kind of thing that’s kept the job interesting for the past 14 years (prior to which, he was a software engineer in the Twin Cities).

“I guess I’m a real problem solver,” he said. “It’s always fulfilling to run into new challenges and figure out how to do something.”

When Harder was at EMU, tinkering with the mainframe computer that used to be in the old Administration Building or the few really early Apples that belonged to the Psychology Department, he had no clue that computers were going to become such a thing. The Internet as it exists now wasn’t something anyone could conceive of.

That makes it hard to hazard a guess as to what sorts of technologies people like him will be troubleshooting in schools in decades to come. Fewer keyboards and more spoken commands, he suspects.

Hostetter concurs on the voice-interfacing thing. 3-D printers are coming, too. Maybe “wearables” like Google Glass will make their way into classrooms eventually. Whatever it is, it’s bound to be something that seems hard to imagine right now.

“It is pretty amazing what all we can do now that just a couple years ago wasn’t possible,” he said.

He also began working with high-end scientific workstations and a Cray-2 Supercomputer as part of a broader Lilly computational chemistry initiative, carried out in conjunction with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

Through this partnership Swartzendruber became familiar with a software project named “Mosaic” – the very first graphical web browser – and with Marc Andreessen, co-author of the software.

In 1993, Swartzendruber traveled to the NCSA to talk with Andreessen (who now serves on the boards of Hewlett-Packard and Facebook). Over a pizza dinner, Swartzendruber talked with Andreessen about the idea of an intranet within Lilly. “All he said was ‘cool,’ although in fairness he was busy eating at the time,” recalls Swartzendruber.

Back at Lilly, Swartzendruber worked for the next year to build web prototypes and to sell IT management on the concept. This ultimately led to the deployment of one of the first intranets at a major corporation. Within 12 months of its release in 1995, ELVIS (or the “Eli Lilly Virtual Information Service”) extended across the global Lilly computer network, linking together 35,000 employees across 120 countries. Swartzendruber’s pioneering work was highlighted inĚýBusiness Week,ĚýInformation Week, and theĚýChicago Tribune, among other major media outlets.

“It was gratifying,” he says, “watching ELVIS grow the way it did. It was interesting and energizing to walk into a Lilly affiliate in Europe or Asia and see what they were doing with ELVIS.”

Swartzendruber, who holds a master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University, retired from Lilly in 2009, but continues to work in the IT field, focusing on ubiquitous computing, system design and IT architecture.

He is currently an IT consultant with Apparatus, an Indianapolis-based IT consulting firm. One of his first responsibilities in 2009 was to help rebuild the computing infrastructure for post-bankruptcy Lehman Brothers so that regulators could dismantle the assets of the investment bank in as orderly and as fair a manner as possible.