• IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i developers can now debug their code in a development environment other than Rational Developer for IBM i or Merlin. The news came last week, when Liam Allan announced that the ILE debugging feature is now available in Code for IBM i, his third-party, IBM i-centric plug-in for Visual Studio Code.

  “Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day!” Allan tweeted from his @Notesofbarry Twitter account. “I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.”

  Indeed, this day has been a long time in coming. Allan, who has not been shy about sharing his dislike …

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• Infoview Systems Launches Lightweight CDC for IBM i

  February 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that have a need to extract the latest transactions hitting their Db2 for i database for downstream CRM, analytics, or fraud detection use cases may want to check out the new change data capture (CDC) offering unveiled recently by Infoview Systems. When coupled with a streaming data platform like Apache Kafka, CDC opens up new possibilities.

  Infoview Systems is a longtime IBM i product and services firm based in Michigan with a global customer base. The company has been active in the data and application integration space for years, first with the sale and implementation of message …

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• Fresche Nabs Silveredge for Application Services

  February 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Silveredge Consulting, the Chicago-based provider of application support services, has been acquired by Fresche Solutions, the Montreal-based IBM i software and services business. The deal nets Fresche a respected consulting shop with a long record of supporting IBM i-based ERP systems such as BPCS and PRMS and two-and-a-half dozen senior RPG programmers.

  Founded in 1987, Silveredge Consulting developed a solid reputation as a provider of application support services. The company started out supporting manufacturers in the Chicago region that ran on the BPCS and PRMS packages, which were also developed in the area. Over the ensuing 35 years, the company …

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• Longtime Product Guy Sarrasin Switches to Services

  February 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  For two decades, Marcel Sarrasin was a product guy. Starting in 2001, Sarrasin helped to develop, market, and sell IBM i software, first for BCD, then Quadrant, and finally Fresche. But last year, Sarrasin got a change of scenery when Fresche promoted him to head up its growing services unit, giving the young executive a significant boost in responsibility and the chance to positively impact an important business line for Fresche: digital transformation services.

  If you’ve ever been to a COMMON conference or attended a BCD, Quadrant, or Fresche Solutions webinar, there’s a good chance you’ve run into Sarrasin. For …

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• Bob Langieri Shares IBM i Career Trends Outlook for 2023

  February 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to career trends in the IBM i community, there are few who have a better sense of what’s going on than Bob Langieri. The longtime CEO of Excel Technical Services in Orange County, California, has his fingers on the pulse of the job situation, which is why we turn to him for an outlook on 2023 trends.

  The economy started out on a down note last year before picking up momentum towards the end of 2022, Langieri notes. Those forces are still with us today, the tea leaves are inconclusive.

  “A recession is defined as two consecutive …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4

  February 1, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are still getting predictions coming in from the IBM i community, and so we have extended this to 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 4, even though we are now into February and technically the Prediction Season is unofficially over. You can’t really say “Happy New Year!” starting today, either, not with Punxsutawney Phil coming out of the ground to prognosticate about the short term winter/spring weather tomorrow.

  Several people from modernization tool maker and cloud provider Fresche Solutions piped up with their predictions. Marcel Sarrasin, newly appointed as chief services officer and general manager of the transformation business at …

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• N2i Gains Traction Among IBM i Newbies

  January 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The YiPS made a big push to inject youth into the IBM i community over a decade ago. But when the youthful vigor ran low, members of the community regrouped, re-energized, and rebranded into a new group called New to IBM i (N2i). And judging from N2i’s recent success, the group has hit on something.

  N2i has its roots in the YiPS, according to Marina Schwenk, who was a YiPS member back in the day and now is active in COMMON and the WMCPA. But there’s a crucial difference between N2i and YIPS, she says.

  “The group that we’re …

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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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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 3

  January 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security. Cloud. AI. The IBM i installed base moves with the general IT tide, which makes these hot topics for all. But what about specific IBM i things, like the availability of IBM i jobs and the difficulty in finding a good RPG developer? These are topics we are tackling in our third – and final – round of 2023 predictions.

  Bob Langieri, the IBM i recruiter who owns Excel Technical Services, has his pulse on the IBM i job situation, particularly in his Southern California region. 2023 looks to be a mixed bag, job-wise, he says.

  “In the …

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• It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.

  I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …

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