Andrew Ireland
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Expanding Fields Is A Bigger Pain In The Neck Than You Think
October 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland
Remember the Y2K problem, when companies had two-digit dates for years in their applications and the millennial turn was coming and they suddenly needed a four-digit date so all the math would work out right comparing the present, future, and past? Well, every time you need to change a field length in your source code – which almost always means making it bigger, not shorter – you have to suffer through a mini Y2K crisis.
Yes, the Y2K crisis did not bring an end to civilization as we knew it, as some were prognosticating and maybe a few were hoping, …
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Value Stream Management: Bringing Lean Manufacturing Techniques To IBM i Development
September 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland
When resources are tight, it is important to optimize their usage and maximize the business value they deliver. This is the very foundation of what is called lean manufacturing or just-in-time manufacturing, which more than a few IBM i shops know a thing or two about because this platform has been used for decades by process and discrete manufacturers to automate their businesses.
The move toward DevOps has allowed software engineers to adopt many of the best practices developed by manufacturing over the last 100 years. These include automating the flow of code, a repository of standard components and a …
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It’s Time For An Application Healthcheck
January 25, 2021 Andrew Ireland
When you get to a certain age – or, perhaps more generously, to a certain level of maturity – it is a good idea to have a health checkup at least once a year to see how your body is holding up and what can be done to deal with any problems that have arisen.
IBM i applications have the same issues as people, as does all software running on any platform – although software is a bit different in that it can be replaced, renewed, rewritten, refurbished or simply left to rot in its swamp of technical debt.
Every …
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Creating Web Services APIs Can Be Easy On IBM i
September 16, 2020 Andrew Ireland
Many IBM i customers are taking a hard look at how they can bring their heritage applications, along with all the significant business value they contain, into a modern world. There are a number of different approaches to do that, and in reality, these methods work together and complement each other. There is no one single route, but rather a combination of approaches that leads to the best results at the lowest cost and the least grief.
The average IBM i customer has something in the order of five million lines of code that embody their mission critical applications. Companies …
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