• Guru: Environment Variables – Global Variables Wearing Hiking Boots

  November 2, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Sometimes a program knows one tiny piece of information that another program, several calls farther down the stack, needs to know.

  The obvious solution is to add another parameter. But sometimes that requires that new parameter added to one or more programs in the call stack. Before long, we’re passing a mushroom basket through half the forest even though most of the programs along the way have no interest in what’s inside it.

  There is another option that has been available on IBM i for a very long time: environment variables. IBM i supports both job-level and system-level environment variables. …

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• IBM i, AI, And The Cost Of “We’ve Always Done It That Way”

  October 19, 2026 Peg Tuttle

  I’ve spent more than 30 years in the IBM i community, and I’ve heard one phrase more times than I can count: “We’ve always done it that way.” Sometimes it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Other times, I think it might be one of the most dangerous things we can say about a technology environment.

  Think about it. IBM i has been running mission-critical business applications for decades. Manufacturing, distribution, financial services, healthcare, retail. These systems process orders, manage inventory, run financial applications, and support operations that cannot afford to stop.

  And they do it remarkably well.

  That reliability is one …

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• GenAI Is The Death Of Deterministic Project Budgeting

  June 15, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Like many of you in the IBM i community, we have been treading the AI waters for a couple of years now, starting with small proof-of-concept applications such as chatbots but progressing to far more advanced and complex code-to-AI interfaces.

  One such project leveraged AI for recurring Jaccard similarity index processing over large sets of business data. The small projects fool a person into thinking that the large projects are just more of the same but, in reality, large projects take you into the world of proprietary AI APIs and can be complex engineering efforts.

  We mostly use ChatGPT because …

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• Who To Consult With On Your Cloud Strategy, And Who To Manage It

  May 18, 2026 Doug McMaster and John Klockenkemper

  If you run IBM i, you already know what operational discipline looks like. Tightly governed security models. Decades of validated business logic embedded in RPG and DB2 for i. Systems of record that have been running continuously since before “the cloud” was anything more than a weather term. Your platform is not fragile – it is, in many ways, the most stable and secure thing in your data center.

  But the world around IBM i has changed. As we discussed in our previous IT Jungle article, the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey data confirms what most shops already know: …

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• Guru: IBM i Job Log Detective Brings Structure To Job Log Analysis In VS Code

  March 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Remain Software has released a new Visual Studio Code extension called IBM i Job Log Detective, and it targets a pain point every IBM i developer understands: reading job logs efficiently.

  In addition to its marketplace availability, IBM i Job Log Detective is open source under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub at: https://github.com/RemainSoftware/jld

  There has never been anything wrong with IBM i job logs themselves. They are exhaustive, consistent, and remarkably detailed. When something fails, the job log contains the truth. The issue has always been consumption. Large QPJOBLOG files can run thousands of lines (or …

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• Three Things For IBM i Shops To Consider About DevSecOps

  October 13, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Way back in the Great Recession, when money was getting tight and the technical debt was getting high, the concept of agile infrastructure evolved into DevOps, the synchronization and coordination of application development, which likes to move fast, with IT operations, which likes to have things running in a stable fashion. The idea runs counter to half of the philosophy of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has espoused the principle to “move fast and break things.”

  DevOps wants to move fast, but it most assuredly does not want to break things, and many millions of programmers and operations staff …

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• Guru: A Faster Way To Sign A JWT

  July 21, 2025 Chris Ringer

  In my prior article, which you can read here, I discussed using the OpenSSL tool to asymmetrically sign a JWT. I like OpenSSL because it’s an open source solution available on many platforms and easy to use. But the decision to use OpenSSL should be coupled with the performance level expectations (the PLA) for your project.

  For instance, how many tokens will you need to create in a given interval? Will your newly minted tokens expire 24 hours from now or in 5 minutes? In my case currently, only about 5 JWTs are needed per day so …

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• Eradani Uses AI For New EDI And API Service

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Eradani this week rolled out a new service aimed at helping customers to accelerate their EDI and API integration projects. What’s unique about its new Managed API and EDI Integration Service offerings is that it uses a large language model (LLM) to essentially take the role of the experienced integration specialist.

  Eradani has been in the data integration business since Dan Magid founded the company in 2018. The Berkeley, California, company sells a tool called Eradani Connect that seeks to eliminate the complexity of data integration challenges involving the IBM i server, and to enable users to connect the IBM …

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• IBM Bolsters Db2 for i With Tech Refreshes

  October 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is delivering a handful of new database capabilities with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, including new function to create Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), new capabilities for the security data mart, and various enhancements to SQL-based IBM i Services.

  A UUID is a random 36-character, 128-bit alphanumeric string that can be used to identify something, such as a row or table in a database, with near certainty that the identifier is unique, has never been used before, and will never be used again.

  The UUID system was first implemented by the Open Software …

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• Eradani Taps GenAI for IBM i Integration Boost

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Eradani introduced a new product last month that uses the power of generative AI to simplify the development of code for integration projects involving IBM i. The company says the new product, dubbed Eradani Assist, will allow customers to use natural language to tell the product to build specific application and data integrations, and the product will leverage one or more large language models (LLMs) to generate the integration code.

  Eradani calls its flagship product, Eradani Connect, an “integration hub” that manages communication into and out of the IBM i platform. The software supports application and data integration projects that …

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