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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Road Warrior You're Not Alone Out There A Shared Vision

Road Warrior

Paul Sepe

Employer: Self-employed

Job: Database developer

DDJ: What exactly do you do when you say you develop databases?

PS: I write the core database software for customers who have a need for high-performance, large database engines. Most of my customers so far have been in the pharmaceutical industry.

DDJ: What do you find satisfying or rewarding about your job?

PS: The fact that I've usually been presented with a blank slate and just some requirements. I've started the code from scratch and seen it through to completion, and that's very satisfying. Also, the freedom that it affords me. I like to travel around—I drive around North America a couple times a year [in a VW with 900,000 miles on it], exploring restaurants—and it lets me travel and still keep working wherever I am.

DDJ: What's the most challenging aspect of your job?

PS: Probably the biggest [challenge] is getting the software in the door in the first place. It's hard to explain how one guy writing software on his own can, in many cases, beat a more generalized solution from a big company.

DDJ: What emerging trends excite you?

PS: In the late 1980s, I was working with databases of a few dozen megabytes. Less than a decade later, the pharmaceutical databases my software managed were in the gigabytes. Now, I'm seeing datasets in the terabytes. But, while we're very good at producing and storing vast quantities of data, especially numbers, it is in some ways getting harder to retrieve it. Data warehouses have become data tombs. I'm looking forward to developing tools that will resurrect buried data.

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