ENDPGM > 2007

Taxiing to Innovation

Blair Wyman's brush with death almost robbed IBM of a great contributor

Public speaking doesn't scare Blair Wyman, senior software engineer for the IBM* System i* platform. Speaking about programming and Java* to an audience of peers at events like COMMON isn't nearly as frightening as staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

Wyman learned this when he drove a cab in Houston in the early 1980s. His third night on the job, Wyman's dispatcher told him to pick up a young woman. She directed him to a rough part of town where Wyman suddenly found himself confronted by a robber pointing a shotgun through his car window. The gunman took the $13 that Wyman had in his shirt pocket, then demanded Wyman get out of the car. But when Wyman reached down to open his door, the robber panicked, fired the gun and fled.

"He must have thought I was pulling a gun," Wyman recalls. Miraculously, the shell from the shotgun blast went between Wyman and the steering wheel. "I can remember a cloud of glass in the street light. The visual is just etched in my memory."

Armed robbery aside, Wyman says driving a taxi provided a great education. "Of all the pivotal experiences in my life, I think cab driving was key," he says. "It exposed me to an across-the-board section of humanity in a non-intrusive way. I was just giving them a ride, but I got to see how weird people are and yet how easy it is to get along with them. I saw that most people are good people. It was kind of an ad-hoc education in psychology."

Before taking up taxi driving, Wyman had studied music at the University of South Dakota but left before completing his studies. In 1984, his parents offered to help him go back and complete his bachelor's degree. He seized the chance, this time majoring in mathematics, which he found came naturally and enjoyably to him. He took a class in Pascal and would run home to show his fiancee the programs he wrote.

When Wyman's father died unexpectedly, he married his college sweetheart, Lynda, and they moved back to his hometown of Rapid City, S.D., to be close to his mother. Wyman wanted to continue his studies, but the local college didn't offer a master's program in mathematics. Remembering how much he had enjoyed that Pascal course, Wyman decided to get his master's in computer science.

Wyman has been with IBM for nearly 20 years, but his fascination with the company stretches back all the way to elementary school, when he had to use a special IBM pencil to fill in the bubbles on a standardized basic-skills test. "I thought it must be an important company," he says.

Now that he's part of that important company, Wyman's proud of the contributions he's made to IBM projects over the years - the tech-achievement award he earned for helping integrate the V3R6 RISC box into the AS/400* series, helping build and architect the Java Native Interface*, figuring out how to make Remote Abstract Window Toolkit work with each new version of Java, helping make JobWatcher into a fast, lightweight and variably intense sampler.

With self-deprecating wit, Wyman likes to joke about how IBM takes "the cream of the crop...and me." But despite what he calls the challenge of keeping up with such bright co-workers, Wyman is hoping to stick around for a couple of decades more. "As long as IBM will have me, I want to be with IBM," he says. "I'm not afraid of the rest of the world, but I do like it here in Rochester."