In this Logic Magazine interview, conducted in late May 2020, Adam Grandt-Nesher spoke about strategies for modernizing legacy infrastructure, moving from the private sector into government technology, and the particular challenges and rewards of public-sector IT.
The conversation reaches back to his beginnings: programming from as far back as he can remember, learning BASIC as a child in Israel before he could read English, memorizing Hebrew command names laid over an English keyboard. He described his mandatory Israeli Army service, where he talked his way out of truck-driving school and into a role as a computer operator on a terminal-based system running a Hebrew query language.
The interview situates that winding career within the larger story of taming legacy systems across private and public sectors, and how it landed him in the middle of mainframe modernization efforts for the U.S. federal government.