Re: Broadening my horizons

"Books and tutorials give a basic "Dick & Jane" understanding, but I'm hung up on how to move forward. Maybe it's just a form of writers block.”

I think the “block” may be the biggest part of your problem.

I encounter a lot of people who play around with new languages and tools but find it difficult to take the next step because they have no specific purpose in mind. Sounds like you are in that boat.

Two approaches that you might consider:

1) Look for a local charity, church, or whatever that needs a new system and offer to build it for them. Use SQL, Node.js, PHP, Python, whatever takes your fancy.

2) Look at the applications your employer is looking at replacing and develop a better version of one of them. Convert the database to use SQL, constraints etc., use the RPG code base for stored procs for the business logic, use node.js for the UI. It doesn’t matter if your employer never uses it - you will have a demonstrable modernization skill to show to your next employer.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Oct 22, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Just facing the possibility that I'm going to be a "free agent" in a few years. I'm looking at my current skillset, the work I'd prefer to do, and trying to move from A to B.

We're a 5250 shop, and will almost certainly be a 5250 shop until they finally pull the plug on our system. A few years back I did a skunkworks project to create web UI's using CGIDEV2 for a few existing 5250 apps. That was tolerated since it was in RPG but pretty much went nowhere.

RPG is not the "be all, end all" that I used to think, but it's still indispensable. It does JDBC, POI, IFS and JNI, which can handle most problems. On occasion, I think that a given problem would be exponentially easier in an OO language, but that's rare.

5250 is a dead-end. It makes me think of an old movie, "Other People's Money", where Danny DeVito talked about the last factory in America that made buggy whips. It didn't matter that they made the best buggy whips because times were changing, and it was adapt or die.


Books and tutorials give a basic "Dick & Jane" understanding, but I'm hung up on how to move forward. Maybe it's just a form of writers block.
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