I have been at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center for over 17 years, ever since graduate school. To give you a sense of what that is like, I shall first give a little background about the range of work I have been able to do there, and then I shall tell the story of WALA, our program analysis framework. I will describe its origins and early use in WebSphere and Rational products, and then how WALA embraced JavaScript. Next, WALA became an open source project, and I talk about that process. And I shall present how WALA became involved in security analysis for AppScan products. And finally I will sketch how WALA has grown, taking several large contributions from academia that have greatly expanded its scope. In all this work, there has been an interplay between research, the needs of IBM products, and the contributors to the open source project; I shall try to illustrate how this creative tension has helped make WALA what is.