Dan Burger
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Not So Hard To See i To i
May 1, 2017 Dan Burger
You’re not the only oyster in the stew. The IBM i community is a combination of unique ingredients that make over-generalizations risky business. The landscape looks different depending on whether your view is from the valley or the mountain. That’s why I like to talk with people with experiences that are different from my own. We learn from different perspectives.
Mike Scanlon has worked most of his 30-plus years in the IT business in eastern Iowa. He came out of college with a software development education that emphasized COBOL. His career path eventually led to a software development job with …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 26
April 26, 2017 Dan Burger
All programming languages gain value from programmers exchanging information the tips and techniques and code samples that get passed around. Open source magnifies this information exchange. Contributing code to make sure that all IBM i languages can benefit is a worthy endeavor, says the business architect of IBM i open source Jesse Gorzinski.
“RPG First” would make a good slogan for lapel pins and bumper stickers. Brian May, a solutions architect at Profound Logic Software, says it’s also good advice to update RPG skills and become a better programmer before taking on another programming language. Learning new languages will be …
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Getting Offensive With The Legacy Label
April 24, 2017 Dan Burger
It’s not that we don’t care about CIOs with concerns. But what concerns us more are solutions to those concerns. It’s just a matter of fact that we hear a lot more about problems than we do about solutions. Members of the IBM i community share many of the same concerns, although each has their individual fingerprints.
To start off down the problem-solving path, it’s not a bad idea to talk about common concerns with colleagues and experts. That’s the path we’re on today as we talk with Alan Seiden, a PHP on IBM i consultant, open source advocate, …
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ARCAD Strengthens IBM i Modernization Portfolio
April 19, 2017 Dan Burger
Two IBM i modernization products have been added to IBM’s eConfig ordering system, signaling an increased emphasis helping customers move forward on the modernization path. The additions come from ARCAD Software and pertain to the conversion of fixed-format RPG source code to free-format code and the analysis of existing IBM i applications.
The conversion of legacy code to modern free form syntax is accomplished by the ARCAD Converter product. The process is recognized as a progressive step toward RPG code that is more easily understood by programmers from outside the RPG world and, therefore, more easily integrated and more easily …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 19
April 19, 2017 Dan Burger
As an IBM i programmer or manager of programmers, how do you instill the mindset of be better today than you were yesterday and be better tomorrow than you are today? It’s not rocket science or brainwashing. See today’s Monitor for how it’s done.
Last week, IT Jungle published a story titled Blockchain: A Link in Your Long Term IBM i Plan. This week, it’s Technology Review writing about blockchain and a conference called the Business of Blockchain. Setting aside the over-inflated expectations and the white hot hype that we’ve come to expect with the next big thing, blockchain …
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Secrets Of IBM i Magic Act Revealed
April 17, 2017 Dan Burger
Can IBM i shops find a way to replace their RPG-oriented staffs with magicians? The answer, in many cases, is that they already have. The RPG staff members are the magicians. They’ve abra-ka-dabra-ed their way to doing more with less for something like 30 years. The clever companies employing these magicians have parlayed this IT staff magic into new technology investments that perpetuate the more for less phenomenon.
One of those technologies is the modern managed services provider, which causes system management to disappear and gives the IT magicians something new to work on . . . like database modernization, …
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S4i Systems Embraces Open Source Project
April 17, 2017 Dan Burger
Open source development on IBM i bodes well for the platform and all those who look to the future as well as recognizing the value of the past. RPG development isn’t threatened by open source options. It’s stimulated by open source. The modernization of RPG, C, or COBOL investments gets a boost from open source. There are people writing applications on IBM i that would not be within shouting distance of the platform if open source language options were not available.
When Web services, mobile applications and other Web technologies become more closely aligned with i, the community benefits. The …
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Blockchain: A Link In Your Long Term IBM i Plan
April 10, 2017 Dan Burger
In general, the IBM i community gets derogatorily tagged with having minimal tolerance for risk. Having little appetite for risk isn’t such a bad thing when the failure rate for implementing a new technology – namely blockchain – in a business environment falls just short of a sure bet. Gartner predicts that 90 percent of the enterprise blockchain projects launched in 2016 and the first half of 2017 will crash and burn within two years.
Sounds like the kind of risk anyone would like to avoid. So why should you care about blockchain? No bandwagon recommendations, but some blockchain awareness …
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Printing Investments In The Digital Age
April 5, 2017 Dan Burger
How does a company that’s invested in AFP and IPDS printing processes modernize to keep pace with increasing demand? There are certainly options. Some are better than others, with strengths varying depending on the ultimate goals. Some are more expensive than others, and that depends on whether the comparison is strictly upfront costs or considers total cost of ownership.
For many companies, print volumes are increasing and weak performance becomes a hot button issue. Slow printer speeds, limited printer availability, and perhaps the worst of all, printer downtime, all need to be addressed. But don’t overlook workflow processes, management of …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 5
April 5, 2017 Dan Burger
Technically, you don’t need SQL to survive. However, if you’re not using it, you should know what you are missing. Here’s a conversational introduction to SQL that can open the door to modern programming techniques that can modernize applications and databases by reducing the amount of coding and moving business logic to the database.
This week’s Monitor also has articles about tech start-ups in unlikely places in the United States heartland, a new IBM Cloud and Red Hat Linux partnership built on OpenStack, IBM’s change of heart regarding work-at-home programs, and a piece on why people should and should not …
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