IBM i Developer Day This Week
November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie
IBM i developers of all stripes are welcome to IBM i Developer Day, a free virtual event that’s scheduled to take place next Friday, November 19, at 1 p.m. ET. Organized by Liam Allan, the event will feature a heavy dose of Visual Studio Code (Allan’s favorite IDE) plus discussions hosted by IBMers on the future of IBM i and its role in the cloud.
The world of application development is moving fast, but many IBM i pros are still stuck in the past when it comes to the tools, technologies, and techniques they use. While RPG and COBOL development can be done in a modern manner, many IBM i programmers are tied to the old ways of doing things.
With the first ever IBM i Developer Day, Allan is hoping to pull the entire IBM i development community together, if just for one day — well, three-and-a-half hours, anyway.
“I am excited to share an idea that I’ve been wanting to try for a while now — a small-scale online event for everyone who is doing development on an IBM i — be it RPG, COBOL, Node.js, PHP,” Allan writes on his company’s GitHub page. “I want to build a small [event] for everyone.”
Liam Allan is organizing the first IBM i Developer Day on November 19.
IBM i Developer Day is an audio-only event that will be streamed via Twitter. Allan is scheduled to give a couple of talks about Visual Studio Code, a “lightweight” IDE developed by Microsoft, including his VS Code for IBM i extension (released earlier this year) that enables the IDE to be used for IBM i development. Other developers who have developed IBM i extensions for VS Code, such as Brian Garland and Barrett Otte, will also speak.
Alan Seiden, the principal of Seiden Group (where Allan is employed as a consultant), will also speak during the event, as will King Harrison IV, a developer at IBM i inventory management software developer K3S. In “The future of development with VS Code & the cloud,” Allan and company will delve into how VS Code and code management tools like GitHub Codespaces, and GitPod can help bring IBM i developers into the future. Allan also says to expect some product announcements around his VS Code for IBM i extensions.
Jesse Gorzinski, IBM’s business architect for open source software, is also scheduled to talk about Node-RED, the Node.JS framework from IBM for developing event-driven data application flows. Brand Pederson, the worldwide product marketing manager for IBM i and Power is also scheduled to discuss IBM i and the cloud.
The entire event will be streamed live on Twitter Spaces. There is no fee for joining. In fact, you don’t even need a Twitter account – you can just drop in. You can get a reminder for the event on Twitter at this link.
For more information, check out ideveloperday.com.
