Jeff Tickner
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DevOps Means Using The Tools You Already Have Better
April 24, 2024 Jeff Tickner
In this world, there are always more than two ways to skin a cat, but the best way to skin any cat is the way you already know how to do it.
The same is true of application development from within a DevOps toolchain. When modernizing development processes on IBM i, the most efficient thing to do, always, is to make use of enterprise tools already in place within the organization and integrate these into a cohesive IBM i workflow that shepherds code from idea to production all along the way.
It may seem obvious to say so, but trust …
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Take A Progressive Approach To DevOps
October 16, 2023 Jeff Tickner
As Gene Amdahl, the chief architect of the IBM System/360 mainframe, correctly observed and what was subsequently codified as Amdahl’s Law, any kind of system that implements any kind of process is only as fast as its slowest component. What is true of bottlenecks in human processes is equally true in systems design and also in that overlapping area known as DevOps – the confluence of application development and system operations.
If you can only be as fast as your slowest bottleneck, the converse is also true that you can speed up overall throughput of a workflow or a …
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VS Code Is The Full Stack IDE For IBM i
March 15, 2023 Jeff Tickner
Back in January, we talked a bit about the rise of the VS Code integrated development environment that was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2015 and that has been increasingly adopted by developers on all kinds of platforms, not just Windows Server. This week, we want to talk about the new features we are exposing in VS Code for users of the application development tooling available from ARCAD Software.
First of all, we have brought the cross reference information in our ARCAD Observer tool into VS Code in a way that developers can access the object-level and field-level …
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Realizing The Promise Of Cross Platform Development With VS Code
January 25, 2023 Jeff Tickner
An integrated development environment is like a tractor or a truck, or indeed any other kind of tool. There are farmers who want a tractor from John Deere or Ford or Massey-Ferguson, contractors who want a Ford or Dodge or GMC truck, and carpenters and electricians who use Dewalt or Milwaukee Electric or Makita cordless tools.
No matter the choice of tools, ultimately these blue collar workers are going to farm and build things, and the choice of tool should not interfere with that effort. White collar – or far more likely no collar T shirt – programmers are no …
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Git Is A Whole Lot More Than A Code Repository
March 16, 2022 Jeff Tickner
It is funny to think that two of the most transformative technologies to hit the datacenter in the past several decades are based on projects created by Linus Torvalds. The first, of course, is the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Linux operating system and which first rolled out in 1991 but didn’t become a real server-class platform until the Dot Com Boom in the late 1990s. The second thing that Torvalds created, out of necessity to help better manage the development and patching of the open source Linux kernel, was the Git repository and version control system. …
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Getting Progressive About Regression Testing
October 22, 2018 Jeff Tickner
(Sponsored Content) If you want to employ modern software development and testing techniques, you have to move on from simple unit testing by developers and implement regression testing in your quality assurance (QA) organization. This is perhaps the best way to take the risk out of continuous development – something that companies have to embrace if they are to remain competitive.
The difference between regression testing and normal testing is that in the most common model, the developer has a request to fix a problem or to add a feature, and they make their changes and do unit …
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