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The post iAdmin Spring 2023 first appeared on iTech Solutions Group.
January 25, 2023
Jenny Thomas
Have you noticed there is national day for just about everything? Just in the month of January, we have national chocolate-covered cherry day, national bean day, national houseplant appreciation day, and national dress up your pet day, to name just a few. As it turns out, we are now in the middle of a week that our industry should probably be celebrating a little bit louder. Data privacy week, which runs from January 22 through 28, was created by the National Cybersecurity Alliance to help spread awareness about online privacy, and educates citizens on how to manage personal information, and organizations understand why it is important to respect users’ data. We’ve got more detail for you in the Top Stories below, as well as lots of additions to the calendar for you to peruse.
(National Cybersecurity Alliance) A handy rundown of data privacy week history and events.
(CyberRes Community) California Consumer Privacy Act puts a spotlight on the importance of data minimization.
(IT Jungle) The Jungle’s own Alex Woodie has been working on a vision board for the IBM i by talking with community experts about what’s to come in 2023. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 of his series.
(FCW) Quantum computing. AI. Cybersecurity. ChatGPT Pro. The future may be here, but COBOL never left.
(CNBC) In honor of data privacy week, here’s a fun look at the 20 most common passwords leaked on the dark web.
(Manta Technologies) It’s the final week of Manta’s year-end sale. All 125 courses – including the Competency Exams and Student Reference Guides – are 30 percent off. The sale ends January 31.
(Fortra) Listen in as IT Jungle’s Tim Prickett Morgan joins a panel of experts to dissect the results of Fortra’s 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey during a free, hour-long webinar this Thursday, January 26. The presentation begins at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
(IBM Champions) It’s time to meet the IBM Champion class of 2023, which boasts 839 IBM Champions from 60 countries around the world.
(Seiden Group) This blog offers tips on how to configure and use SSH on IBM i.
(Charles Guarino Blog) Charlie makes the case to advocate for your IT team and the work you do.
January 26 – Franklin, Tennessee & Online – Get “Tricks with spool files using SQL” with Simon Hutchinson (RPGPGM.COM) at the January IBM Midrange User Group (IMUG) meeting. This is a free event open to non-members.
January 26 – Webinar – The results of Fortra’s 9th annual IBM i Marketplace Survey will be unveiled during this free, hour-long webinar. IT Jungle’s Tim Prickett Morgan will join a panel of experts, including Fortra, executive vice president of technical solutions Tom Huntington, worldwide IBM i product marketing manager Brandon Pederson, and IBM i product managers Dan Sundt and Alison Butterill. The presentation begins at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
January 26 – Webinar – Join ARCAD for part one of a three-part Roundtable Webinar Series, where ARCAD experts will demystify the move to Git and an automated process with options that work for everyone. During this first session, the discussion will focus on developer tools and ways to use Git including iProject, Merlin, VS Code, ARCAD’s Centralized option, and more.
January 31 – Webinar – Join this live webinar to learn where malware danger lies and how you can protect your systems. Power security expert Sandi Moore will discuss real-world examples of malware attacks on IBM i, and provide effective tactics for avoiding infections.
January 31 – Webinar – Discover how you can achieve faster processes, greater business agility, and improved data quality during Precisely’s webinar “The 6 Features You Need for Automation Success.”
February 1 – Webinar – Join iTech Solutions, a Service Express company, for a webinar with Steve Pitcher as he covers the Basics of Enterprise Identity Management. These sessions are designed for anyone starting out as an IBM i system admin, looking to refresh their knowledge, or looking to learn more.
February 9 – Webinar – Join ARCAD for part two of a three-part Roundtable Webinar Series, where ARCAD experts will demystify the move to Git and an automated process with options that work for everyone. During this second session, the discussion will focus on feature/release, branch management, and building the branches with tools like Bob and ARCAD.
February 15 – Webinar – Learn how to modernize IBM i data access without programming at this free webinar hosted by New Generation Software. See a demo and learn about low-cost licensing options, tech support, maintenance, and education.
February 23 – Webinar – Join ARCAD for the final session of a three-part Roundtable Webinar Series, where ARCAD experts will demystify the move to Git and an automated process with options that work for everyone. During this third session, the discussion will focus on pipeline tools like Jenkins and the new automation features of Git packages.
March 8 – Webinar – Join Rocket Software for a Women Leaders In Technology (WLIT) coffee talk for International Women’s Day. The team from reacHIRE will be discussing how they support women in building their leadership skills, relationships, and community so that their careers and lives thrive, which also enables organizations to build a strong and diverse leadership pipeline.
March 14-16 – Delavan, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association (WMCPA) will be having its annual Spring technical conference in-person at Lake Lawn Resort in 2023.
April 24-27 – Denver, Colorado – Save the date for COMMON’s POWERUp 2023, which will be held at Sheraton Denver Downtown.
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 different in having strong preferences when it comes to their IDEs. But the choice of IDE should not hinder developers as they create applications for the IBM i platform, and moreover, the choice of the VS Code IDE commonly used by developers working on Linux, MacOS, and Windows platforms should not stop them from developing code for the IBM i platform.
There is a lot of buzz around Visual Studio Code, which is the formal name of the open source spinoff of the Visual Studio IDE that Microsoft released to the world back in early 2015. VS Code is based on the Electron framework, which was made initially to create Node.js applications and has the same editor that Microsoft created at the core of its Azure DevOps tool for creating applications for the Azure cloud. VS Code can be the source code editor for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Node.js, Python, Rust, Fortran, and other languages.
Importantly, VS Code integrates tightly with the Git code repository. And this is one of the secrets of VS Code’s success. Using the ARCAD integration with Git, any number of disparate IDEs can be used for IBM i software development, even within the same team. With ARCAD, a given developer can choose either Merlin, VS Code, Rational Developer for i (RDi), or even green screen PDM to make his code change via Git. Today, a new generation of programmers who use VS Code can create and deploy code for the IBM i platform without knowing anything at all about the IBM i platform itself.
Part of the magic behind the VS Code integration with the IBM i platform comes from an open source project called Code for i comprising plug-ins to VS Code that give developers access to IBM i language parsers and compilers – RPG, COBOL, CL – and allows code created within VS Code to be compiled on Power Systems iron. Now that your RPG or COBOL is in Git, how to you build? It’s easy – using the ARCAD Builder engine.
Additionally, VS Code is also a key element in the IBM strategy for IBM i development. Indeed, the IBM Merlin DevOps & Modernization platform for IBM i together with its integrated VS Code-compatible IDE has been designed for a modern hybrid cloud world with a browser-based UI. IBM uses ARCAD’s build engine for Merlin. Merlin is a strategic platform securing the generational transition for IBM i development and is key to safeguarding the future of today’s mission critical IBM i applications.
More and more features are being added to these VS Code-based solutions, including code coverage which tells you what portions of your code are actually running and which portions are not really executing as the application churns through its work. There is even support for a native IBM i debugger available in Merlin now.
With ARCAD’s integration of IBM i with Git as well as Jenkins continuous integration/continuous deliver automation, and Jira bug tracking tools, we have been bringing the IBM i developers into the same kind of environment and DevOps process that the open systems people have been using for a long time.
But here is the interesting thing.
When we started down the road with Git, so many years ago, we assumed that we would get traction with small, private companies that had the most flexibility and could adopt new things easily. But the exact opposite happened. The largest companies – banks and insurance companies – that had already adopted the DevOps approach and open source software had been waiting to adopt it for their IBM i platforms because they had already been using it for Linux, Windows, and Unix platforms.
Here is how VS Code integration with Git and IBM i integration with Git are a powerful combination for IBM midrange shops.
I’m implementing ARCAD for DevOps with an insurance company right now – obviously I can’t say who they are, but they are an Azure shop. They have their IBM i developers using RDi and they are excited that they can also choose VS Code as an IDE. As they roll VS Code out, aside from the parity on the IBM i platform, another benefit that they have is that the open systems developers on Azure can interact with the DB2 for i database, but they don’t know anything about it.
Previously, their process was to use stored procedures and user defined SQL functions to access data on DB2 for i. But because they have been siloed, the .NET developer would go into Visual Studio and create a description of the SQL function and then they would have to hand it off to the native IBM i developer, who would write it and put it in test. And then the .NET developer would check to see if it actually works the way they described the function. It’s a lot of back and forth and is very inefficient.
Now with the ARCAD integration with Git, the .NET developer can go into Visual Studio, and without doing anything special they can write a stored procedure directly and push it into the IBM i Git repository and it will be built on the IBM i platform. And they can test it and it doesn’t have to involve another developer. They can be autonomous. And they don’t have to have any access to the IBM i – they don’t even know what an IBM i platform is. They know how to write SQL and that is all they need to know.
As you might imagine, the native IBM i developers were at first a little reluctant to let this happen – being IBM i experts and wanting to ensure the quality of their applications, they liked having control, even though it wasn’t an efficient use of their time. But with ARCAD and Git we can ensure they have the control they need, by setting up a process in Azure that ensures that the developer can’t merge this into the main branch until a code review has taken place, leaving the IBM i developer to validate the code the .NET developer has produced. This is the process that the open systems developers have been using for a long time and with ARCAD we can transparently bring the IBM i developers into this agile way of working.
VS Code is becoming a standard because it is readily available and extensible. People add more functionality all the time. When the kids in college are learning how to develop, they normally use VS Code now. And when they take their first job, they can now be an IBM i developer without even realizing it.
The important thing to realize is that VS Code without ARCAD is not, of itself, sufficient for managing IBM i source. You also need the ARCAD layer (also shipped within Merlin) which automates dependency builds, static code checking, unit testing, regression testing, deployment, and so on. ARCAD has 30 years of experience managing code on directly on the IBM i platform, and while it is possible to do it without our Git implementation, it is just not going to be much fun and it is just not going to scale and it will have a lot of manual setup and intervention.
To learn more about the ARCAD solutions for DevOps on IBM i, join our Webinar series:
[IBM i Webinar] Demystifying DevOps on IBM i
Jeff Tickner is chief technology officer for North America at ARCAD Software.
This content is sponsored by ARCAD Software.
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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 IBM i-RPG job market, hiring has been stalled or slower for the last year,” Langieri tells IT Jungle. “I am hearing from more RPG developers who have retired, but still want to work part-time. It’s pretty normal now to see more people working until the age of 70 or longer. They are a real value, but most companies are ignoring resumes that show their age as working since 1980 or signs of System/36 or System/38. I feel no need to go back more than 20 years on a resume.
“COVID forced many employers to accept remote workers, especially programmers/software developers,” Langieri continues. “So now besides COVID being a reason for working remote, the expense of commuting will force even more people into remote. Employment participation is down as more people have been lured by unemployment checks and government handouts to stay home or thought maybe it’s a good time to re-evaluate your career and life.”
Richie Palma, an account executive with iTech Solutions Group (acquired by Service Express last year) in Farmington, Connecticut, foresees new hardware being installed into many IBM i shops this year.
“I believe we are going to see many more IBM i shops making the move to Power10 and external IBM FlashSystem SAN storage, in an effort to harness the power of IBM Flashcopy, hardware-based replication, and big time performance of Power10 and IBM Flashcore modules,” he says.
Alan Seiden, principal of Seiden Group in Ho-ho-kus, New Jersey, is bullish about the potential to find IBM i developers in 2023.
“In 2023, companies who put in the effort will be pleasantly surprised at the ease of finding skilled RPG developers,” Seiden predicts. “Dissatisfied with old-fashioned rigid management, many are seeking flexibility, meaningful work, appropriate challenge, and growth opportunities. Those companies that staff adequately and cross-train RPG with Web and API technology will be the best-positioned.”
Chuck Losinski, director of technical solutions with Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) foresees fresh perspectives in 2023, along with a focus on succession planning.
“I am seeing this first-hand and expect it to accelerate in 2023,” he says. “Experienced Power Systems developers and administrators, often who share the same role, are desperate to leave their systems in good hands. They are working with management to bring in IT talent with zero IBM i experience and mentoring them. To quote one such effort, ‘Once they are hooked, they don’t want to leave the platform.’
“This brings a fresh look at bringing a modern end-user interface using today’s development tools, while the back-end database is leveraged using a familiar tool — SQL,” Losinski continues. “In turn, the veterans are looking at the systems’ automation tools they already have in place and are taking steps to review setup and ‘make things right’ before turning over the reins to the up-and-coming ‘rising stars.’”
Kevin Beasley, CIO of VAI on Long Island, New York, sees security rising to the top of corporate priorities in 2023.
“Security has become an imperative, even in the IBM i world. Businesses are going to lock down their systems even tighter and also engage third party companies for penetration and vulnerability testing this year,” Beasley says. “Part of this will be an uptake of IBM i 7.5, which adds even more levels of security. Also, the ongoing move to the cloud in the IBM i world will continue its steady trend upward.”
Patrick Staudacher, an executive recruiter with Talsco, Inc. in Muskego, Wisconsin, predicts the IBM i trends of the past several years continuing, but with a twist.
Remote work: “While we are seeing some openings that require developers to work on-site, the majority of the roles we work on are either 100 percent remote or hybrid (a mix of in office and remote). Remote work has been a game changer for the IBM i community,” he says.
Interoperability of the IBM i: “The development of APIs, web services and the use of new tools to extent the reach of RPG applications systems will continue. We are seeing many of our clients lead they. The continued success of the IBM i platform is about making it interoperable with other systems. Developers who add additional skills to their toolbox will make this happen,” Staudacher says.
Strong demand: “Currently we are seeing strong demand on both the direct hire and consulting side of our business. While the economy in 2023 could have some impact on certain industries, we believe this will be minimal due to the retiring RPG workforce and the push for modernization,” he says.
Finding good technical help will become harder in 2023, predicts Robert Swanson, a senior partner with CNX Corp., which is based in Chicago, Illinois. Could the market be on the cusp of a rapid uptick in productivity tools sales and usage?
“This may be a slightly myopic viewpoint due to the market we cater to, but we’re seeing an unrelenting trend toward the need to ‘do more with less’ in IT, as skilled, affordable and (most importantly) available developers for IBM i – or really any platform, for that matter – have gotten almost insurmountably difficult and expensive to find, particularly post-COVID,” Swanson says. “Propelled largely by the need for applications to support a decidedly more off-site workforce, many companies have amassed quite a backlog of development tasks over the past few years and can’t simply hire their way out of it. So with nowhere else to turn, our expectation/prediction is that demand for methods and tools to help IT cut development time at these companies will rapidly go into high gear this year. Accordingly, we’ve been directing nearly all of our development efforts in recent months toward enhancing our low-code/no-code utilities.”
Donnie MacColl, the senior director of technical support and GDPR data protection officer at Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), sees IBM i shops recognizing security as a revenue enabler rather than a cost center.
“Fortra’s Powertech security solutions and those like it are seen as a revenue enabler not an unnecessary cost,” he says. “As an example, if I want to buy something online, I need to trust everything from that supplier, the platform, the application software, the financial systems taking my payment details, the delivery company — everything in the supply chain. IBM Power Systems are very securable and by using mature security solutions and managed security services from a trusted partner like Fortra, organizations can concentrate on their core business and trust the experts to look after their security.”
Bob Cancilla has had strong opinions about IBM and the IBM i platform in the past, and he continues to have strong opinion about their futures.
“My advice is to make plans to migrate off the platform,” Cancilla writes. “IBM has reduced the resources allocated to the platform and is only a matter of time before they drop it. There are many good tools to modernize, move away from RPG and become platform neutral.”
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 looking to attract . . . is anyone new to the platform,” Schwenk tells IT Jungle. “And that doesn’t necessarily mean those who are coming straight out of college. It can be those who are literally new to the IBM i platform. That could be someone who, this is a second carer for them. Or maybe they’ve been working in IT for 20 years, but they’ve been working on a Microsoft or a Linux platform, but now they’re coming to IBM i.”
Schwenk originally worked with COMMON marketing manager Anna Marrah to transform YIPS into N2i in 2019, and soon was joined by Richie Palma, an account executive with iTech Solutions and Shelly Petty, who works at Everbrite with Schwenk (and who we profiled last year).
The recharged group was ready to make a big splash in 2020, but then the pandemic hit and things were pushed back. After holding virtual meetings in 2020 and 2021, N2i held its first in-person get-together at the COMMON POWERUp conference in New Orleans last May. And now it’s looking to take the group to the next level.
“The group has literally just taken off,” says Schwenk, who was just named an IBM Champion for Power again. “We have seen an exponential growth in our numbers, especially in attendance at a lot of these events.”
Education is the focus of the two virtual meetings that N2i holds every month. The group has found an audience with its “getting started” series, usually held the second Monday of every month, which group attracts top-notch speakers, like Jesse Gorzinski and Carol Woodbury, who give talks on entry-level topics, such as getting started with IoT or getting started with security. Other popular topics that have been covered include getting started with RPG and getting started with Python.
“Our focus has pretty much been anyone who needs education on IBM i who has never touched it before,” Schwenk says. “Those are the skills that we are trying to hit, regardless of where they’re coming from.”
Folks just starting with the IBM i platform can also attend the N2i track at POWERUp, which is being held in Denver, Colorado, this spring, and NAViGATE, which will be held in Virginia Beach, Virginia, this fall. It’s important to pick conference sessions that truly are suitable for beginners, which isn’t always as straightforward, Schwenk says.
“Some of the beginner sessions, they’re fine. N2i people are able to hit it. But for other N2i people, it might be a little bit too advanced,” she says. “Some sessions are marked beginner but they’re a little bit more advanced. Some are marked beginner and they’re really beginner.”
Marina Schwenk helped spearhead the creation of N2i from YiPS.
Later this year, N2i and COMMON will take their joint educational mission up a notch with the launch of N2i bootcamps. These educational sessions, which are modeled after existing COMMON bootcamps, will allow N2i and COMMON to go deeper on a particular topic that’s suitable for beginners. While participation in most N2i events is free and open to anybody, bootcamp participants must be COMMON members and there will be a fee involved.
“This is where becoming a COMMON member is a benefit to someone who is part of N2i,” Schwenk says.
Finally, N2i has launched a mentorship program that seeks to pair IBM i newbies with experienced hands on a virtual basis. “If you have experience in RPG development or SQL – that kind of stuff – then you can mentor somebody who is looking for that skillset,” Schwenk says.
Ideally, a mentor will have at least 10 years of experience on a particular aspect of the platform and is willing to share their knowledge with somebody new to the platform, Schwenk says. But that number is not set in stone.
N2i has already matched six people in the mentorship program, and it’s looking to match more. “It’s very successful and it’s thriving,” she says.
All told, N2i appears to have succeeded where the YiPS group petered out. The participation level is up, and Common Europe has even started its own version of the N2i for the Old World, dubbed NextGen Common Europe.
Last week, N2i and NextGen held a joint event, the Loopback Hackathon, that brought together platform enthusiasts from around the world. Judging from the success of that event, there are likely to be similar ones in the future.
“What we’re seeing in Europe is that the COMMON NextGen is very excited, very passionate about the platform,” Schwenk says. “What I see for the future is there’s going to be a lot of synergy between N2i and NextGen.”
