In early 1997 I started my professional career with a small start-up company called FastLane Technologies Incorporated. I believe I was employee number 12 or 13 at the time; I can’t recall exactly which. It was my first job out of university and my task was to add commands to a scripting language called FINAL (FastLane Integrated Network Application Language). This product was quite amazing in its time. It gave administrators a scripting environment with a pretty large quantity of commands so that they could administer their Windows (at the time NT, and then later 2000) environments more easily through automation (sound familiar?). It was quite a successful product, impressing people by how few lines of script they would have to write to get their job done.
As time went on FastLane expanded their product offering and began developing GUI products that were built on top of the FINAL scripting language (again, this sure seems familiar). These “point solutions” were designed to solve administration pains through a GUI that allowed them to point-and-click their way to administrative bliss. Eventually the FINAL scripting language evolved such that you could take advantage of its functionality by being able to call its commands from other languages too. In this form it was called DM/Developer. Shortly after that, in August of 1999 I left FastLane to persue opportunities with a few other start-ups until I returned to my professional roots in January of 2004 when I accepted a job at Quest Software (I say my professional roots because Quest Software bought FastLane on June 29, 2000; in fact, many of the old FastLaners I used to work with are still with Quest Software today and others that have left in the past have returned as well).
Now, more than 10 years since I started my career working with a scripting language that was designed to allow Windows administrators to automate many Windows administration tasks, here I am spending every free minute I can working with a scripting language that was designed to allow Windows administrators to automate many Windows administration tasks. And it just so happens that my employer has a product called PowerGUI, a product build on top of the PowerShell scripting language to help solve administration scripting pains through a GUI.
Is that déjà vu, or what?
Life in the FastLane truly has come full circle for me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!
Kirk out.
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[…] Well, technically I’ve never been hired as a Sysadmin. My first related full-time job was while I finished University. I started working at FastLane Technologies Inc., where I worked on FINAL, a scripting language for Sysadmins. You can read more about that here. […]