Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.
A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.
Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars
When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.
We do heterogeneous computing in our shop with a mixture of OpenVMS and CentOS-7. I have noticed a funny thing in that mistakes made on other OSs decades ago (RT-11, RSX, VMS) are being repeated in the Linux world -AND- there is no way to stop it. One example is when someone installs a new version of Python which breaks a lot of stuff including YUM and the Firewall GUI to only name two of many. Most people coming from a VAX/VMS background know that DCL was changed with the introduction of VMS-5 and this caused problems when some people modified installation scripts which would not work on VMS4. This caused DEC to move from DCL scripts to the PRODUCT command. Anyway, I have a few more Linux anomalies listed here: http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_linux.html#realworldlinuxproblems