Pay I.T. forward

Wow! It's December already!

After a whirlwind year involving moving the whole family, two dogs and a pile of News 3x/400 magazines to this side of the pond I cant believe it's nearly 2010 already. Two thousand nine has seen us settling into our new life in the US, focussing mainly on IBMi and I feel that I've reached a kind of career milestone. After a couple of years focusing on other areas, in the IT wilderness, this year has seen my return to the IBM Midrange club and in the immortal words of Gary Glitter “I’m glad to be back”

The last twelve months have seen huge changes in my personal outlook on information technology and my role within it. I've learned more about programming techniques than I thought possible and its seriously changed how I approach my role as an IBMi Developer.

I've attended a couple of fantastic conferences (Rpg World and iSeries Devcon) that have re-ignited my passion and combined with meeting a bunch of terrific IT Peeps* has helped me to evolve and shrug off my Legacy AS400 RPG Analyst Programmer skin and emerge blinking as a Modern IBMi Developer.

In the style of Pay it forward - it's time for me to offer something:  PROJEX400 is going Open Source.

The Projex400 toolkit has travelled the world, and been sold into a few dozen midrange sites over the last 15 years. All compiled objects sets (EGGS - think "ZIP files for the IBMi") will be available to download and install directly from here for free.

I'm playing with the Source Code layouts and removing the old Shareware type windows (hey come one... I did write this stuff back in the early 90's when shareware was cool!) and going through and trying refactor all RPG/III to RPG/IV to RPG/Free and beyond.

I have some exciting ideas about XML based core commands for sharing source code between IBMi systems and some neat new utilities that I've cobbled together from existing online code, that’s been tweaked and tuned to my requirements.

I'm firing up my personal iSeries this weekend and am going to dedicate every weekend to getting the code online before Christmas.

In the meantime the old Projex400 Shareware package can still be downloaded and installed.... and will work just fine.... but if you want the source code then wait till Santa Finkpad has finished ;)

~ Sometimes it’s not about where you’re going... it’s about how you get there ~

* in no particular order: Toby Schofield, Bob Cozzi, Greg Veal, Bertie Magee, Aaron Bartell, Jon Paris, Susan Gantner and many more online people that contributed to thousands of lines of technical pointy headed blurb that I have consumed over the last 12 months. My thanks to you all for rekindling my enthusiasm for the IBMi, RPG, PHP and computing in general!