Are you educating yourself?

Are you going to COMMON? If not, why not? OK, yeah, COMMON is kind of pricey. Add air fare, hotel, & food to the conference fee and you’re talking real money (not quite $100M though <grin/>). Next question: Do you attend your local user group meetings? What about their technical conferences? Word of advice: If…

Document Decision

As developers, it’s been drilled into our heads that we must provide documentation for our programs … both inside the code, as comments, and for end user’s use. One thing I’ve noticed that we tend to neglect, however, is to document the DECISIONS we make. Why did we select one implementation over another.

SEU in the age of Twitter

I was having a conversation on Twitter, and… hm? Yes, Twitter’s one of those new-fangled thingies that nobody can really explain to you why you should be bothered with it. Yes, email works perfectly well, as do the telephone and the telegraph. This opinion piece isn’t about Twitter; it’s about why I think SEU is…

Plans for 2009?

What are your technological plans for 2009? Got any interesting personal projects that you’ve planning on undertaking? Any new technologies you want to learn? Personally, I’m going to make a concerted effort to get a better handle on web applications. I’ve been focusing so much on server side application code (interfaced from RPG, not the…

Job Hunting

This is an example of how NOT to send a resume to a prospective employer.

System i evolution: The missing link is still missing (Part 2)

How did we do? Well, it has been a mixed bag. Our interest in keeping the solution cross platform quickly ran aground as we faced the difficulty in getting the more entrenched RPG programmers to embrace Java as well as finding Java programmers who were comfortable in the System i world. We also got some…

WebFacing vs. CGIDEV2 … My Experience…

We initially began our iSeries modernization process with writing custom web apps using WDSC utilizing the Webfacing feature. I first learned about WebFacing at COMMON in San Antonio in 2004. At the time it seemed like the answer we were looking for. So, I purchased Claus Weiss’ book “Understanding the IBM WebFacing Tool.” This is…

System i evolution: The missing link is still missing (part 1)

Five years ago I started a company with a few other folks who were trying to “save” a school administration system that was written in RPG that we did not own. In this particular case, the company that owned the software and the source code was really just using the customer base as a revenue…

Live or die RPG; just make it quick

I have started to read more of Timothy Pricket Morgan’s (from here on out written as Tim) articles and am liking how he approaches the usefulness of the iSeries. What I mean by that is he realizes that some significant ground could be made in the RPG programming realm if the higher up stiff necks…