Talking Training And Skills With System i Developer
September 29, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Between 2007 and 2021, the partners in System i Developer – Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, and Paul Tuohy – hosted two RPG & Db2 Summit events per year to help OS/400 and IBM i shops create better databases and the applications that ride atop them. The coronavirus pandemic put the kibosh on these in-person events and were, frankly, a lot of work for the partners to bring together and represented a huge financial risk as all in person events always do. (I know this from personal experience over at my other job at The Next Platform.)
But after Tuohy retired in 2023, there was still work for Gantner and Paris to do for the IBM i community, and that meant getting new partners to carry on the work and also bringing new training content to market in a way that was not as financially risky as a full-on, in-person event.
About a month and a half ago, Gantner and Paris brought on the new partners – well known IBM i Champions Patrick Behr, Simon Hutchinson, and Mike Pavlak – and also planned a second edition of the Lunch & Learn series of mini events that are hosted online for free in conjunction with sponsorships from prominent IBM i vendors.
Getting all five of the System i Developers on the Zoom at the same time across lots of different time zones was not easy, and so I only got four out of the five on the horn to talk about training and skills issues in the IBM i base and to hear a bit more about the Lunch & Learn series. But here we are:
We hope you enjoy the conversation, and we also hope you will sign up for the Lunch & Learn events, which are 75-minute sessions and which will be held on October 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, and 30, as well as on November 4, 5, and 6. You can find out more about the events and sign up at this link.
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Thanks to Timothy Prickett Morgan for showcasing the System i Developer partners and for the information on the forthcoming webinars for IBM i programmers education.
Thanks also for asking interesting questions and the interesting answers by he System i Developer partners.
I do not lexpect any significant meaningful help from IBM itself.
It is very clear to me, after many decades in the IBM i world and working with thousands of IBM i programmers that by far the most crucial thing is to see and record exactly what programs are executing , including data, to allow instant understanding os the exection of the most complex programs as in a video recording. That real-time recording allows understanding of virtually ALL RPG, COBOL, and CLP programs from the earliest RPG2 to the latest RPG and COBOL and CLP programs.
This capability, called Direct Audit, is illustrated in website
https://www.toolmaker.de/produkte/directaudit-echtzeit-software-analyse